Copyright © 2019-2020, Brendan Doms
Licensed under the MIT license

A jumping off point for building modern web apps.

Uses Python 3, Tornado, and Peewee on the back end, with Vue, Svelte, or no JavaScript on the front end.

Make sure you have Python 3 installed.

Install Poetry.

You don't have to use a front end framework with Trestle. The basic app can do everything it needs to server-side.

If you do want to go make something more JS heavy, then there are two main options described below. You can always choose neither and roll your own, using Trestle as only the back end.

Svelte requires everything to be set up and working - JS package management, builds, etc. It is the most feature complete and modern option, but that comes with a lot of weight and overhead. If you want to go in that direction, then you must also:

Install Yarn.

Vue can be used without package management or a build system, which gives you the advantage of being able to create a modern, reactive web app without having to install nodejs or any other JS packages. (And you can install all those things later, if you like.) If you like this hybrid approach then there's nothing else to install.

Clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:bdoms/trestle.git

If you don't want to retain the history as part of your project then we recommend this one line squash:

git reset $(git commit-tree HEAD^{tree} -m "Initial commit.")

poetry install

yarn install

Make sure postgres is installed (the last dependency on here is for psycopg2 support):

sudo apt install postgresql libpq-dev

Then get into postgres:

sudo -u postgres psql

Create the local database and create a user to access it:

WARNING! These values are provided as examples only. Do not use these in production!

CREATE DATABASE trestle;
CREATE USER trestle_user WITH PASSWORD 'trestle_password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE trestle TO trestle_user;

Now modify the connection data in config/constants.py to reflect your local configuration.

Once that's done, build the tables for the first time by running the models file as a script:

python model.py

Repeat the above steps to setup a testing database:

CREATE DATABASE trestle_test;
CREATE USER trestle_test WITH PASSWORD 'trestle_test';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE trestle_test TO trestle_test;

Trestle uses a builtin memory LRU cache by default. However you can easily enable memcache support. This is not required, but it is highly recommended in production. First, get memcached installed:

sudo apt install memcached

Then uncomment the appropriate line in pyproject.toml and run poetry install again.

Finally, modify the top of helpers.py by commenting and uncommenting the appropriate lines. Also, make sure your connection host and port are correct!

Whatever you go with for javascript - no front end, Svelte, or Vue - you'll have to make a few modifications to the code. Particularly, in all cases, you'll need to modify controllers/app.py and the routes in main.py.

It's also a good idea to remove the files related to the other options as described below.

You'll need to remove the views.

rm views/user/auths.html
rm views/user/email.html
rm views/user/index.html
rm views/user/password.html

Simply remove the svelte folder and the JS package files.

rm views/svelte.html
rm -rf svelte
rm package.json
rm yarn.lock

Remove the Vue html and js files, including the libraries.

rm views/vue.html
rm -rf static/j/lib
rm static/j/vue.js

• Replace values for environment variables in config/constants.py
• Replace values for environment variables in supervisord.conf
• In both cases:
  • Replace SENDER_EMAIL with the email address that emails should come from
  • Replace SUPPORT_EMAIL with the email address where you would like to receive support-related messages, such as error alerts
• Replace YOU@YOUR_DOMAIN.com in views/static/terms.html for DMCA compliance
• A sample Terms of Service and Privacy Policy have been provided as examples, but you are solely responsible for their content and how they apply to your site

• Remember to escape any untrusted user content you display in templates
  • This happens by default, but always be careful, and you can use the escape() function to do it explicitly
• Add an entry to views/sitemap.xml for each page you want indexed by search engines
• Modify static/robots.txt to disallow any pages you don't want crawled (on a per branch basis)
• Enable and/or modify security features HSTS and CSP in controllers/_base.py
• Add new back end tests in tests
• If using Svelte, then add front end tests in svelte/tests
• After updating production, clear the cache and run migrations via /dev

Back end:

poetry shell
python main.py --debug

You also need to run another command for the front end in another terminal:

yarn start

Note that routing is handled by page.js

python tests

Pass --unit or --lint as to only run unit tests or the linter, respectively.

You can also specify an individual file to run tests on, relative to the tests directory:

python tests test_default.py

You can run front end JS tests by:

yarn test

Learn about front end testing options with Ava.

Highly recommend you run something like this harden script to secure a new server.

There are some additional packages to install and configure in production:

sudo apt install nginx supervisor

If you want to enable memcache support, remember to isntall it in production:

sudo apt install memcached

Make directories for the app:

sudo -u www-data mkdir -p /srv/web

Create a sym link to the config.

sudo ln -s /srv/web/supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf

Start the supervisor daemon:

sudo service supervisor restart

Create symbolic links to conf files:

sudo mv /etc/nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.old
sudo ln -s /srv/web/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Start the nginx server:

sudo service nginx restart

Copy the source code from the local machine (note that the trailing slash matters here). Note that this method does not include package files.

You could include the node_modules and Python packages here if you want to. However, that could increase transfer size and time significantly, so we choose not to. The better alternative is to create limited access user for your repo and have them clone it. For example, GitLab enables this with deploy tokens.

rsync -avzhe ssh --progress --delete --exclude={.cache,.git,dist,node_modules,tests,__pycache__,*.pyc} trestle/ YOUR_USERNAME@IP_ADDRESS_OR_HOST:/srv/web

A deploy script is available to run all the relevant commands to build and restart the app at once. Run it with:

./deploy.sh

Note that this is purposefully run without sudo, but you will be prompted to authenticate.

Logs are in /var/log/supervisor/.

You only need to restart nginx if its config has changed. Run this to pick up the changes:

sudo service nginx restart

Be sure to uncomment these two lines in deploy.sh if you're using Svelte, so the app gets synced and rebuilt:

yarn install
yarn build

You can fine tune builds with lots of options from Parcel.

Replace the defaults below with whatever you specified for your database connection above.

pg_dump -W -U trestle_user -F t trestle > trestle.tar

Transfer:

scp trestle.tar YOUR_USERNAME@IP_ADDRESS_OR_HOST:/srv/web/

And restore:

pg_restore -d trestle -U trestle_user trestle.tar