Deploying GovReady-Q in Production environments¶

These instructions assume that GovReady-Q is installed by the user govready-q, in the directory /home/govready-q/govready-q/.

To verify that this is the case, run the following command, and check whether GovReady-Q responds to HTTP requests (on localhost:8000 by default).

cd /home/govready-q/govready-q/ && python3 manage.py runserver

If GovReady-Q is installed successfully, proceed with the rest of these configuration instructions. If it doesn’t, see OS-specific install instructions.

Set basic configuration variables¶

Create a file named local/environment.json (ensure it is not world-readable) that contains site configuration in JSON, with some recommended settings:

{
  "debug": false,
  "host": "webserver.example.com",
  "https": true,
  "secret-key": "generate random string using e.g. https://www.miniwebtool.com/django-secret-key-generator/",
  "static": "/home/govready-q/public_html/static"
}

Because of host header checking, to test the site again using python3 manage.py runserver you will need to visit it using webserver.example.com and not localhost. (Be sure to replace webserver.example.com with your hostname.)

Remember to Define Your `host`¶

The DisallowedHost…Invalid HTTP_HOST header…You may need to add ‘’ to ALLOWED_HOSTS is a common error received when first trying to get GovReady-Q running on a server at a specific domain. The error indicates the domain you are trying to visit is not white listed in Django’s special ALLOWED_HOST variable.

For security, Django requires white listing your server’s domain(s) in the ALLOWED_HOST variable. Ordinarily this is hardcoded into the settings.py file. GovReady-Q allows the ALLOWED_HOST to be set by the host environment settings so the values can be passed at runtime.

host must be defined, or GovReady-Q will default value to localhost

Setting up the Database Server¶

For production deployment, it is recommended to use dedicated database software, rather than SQLite.

The recommended database is PostgreSQL - see instructions on setting up Q with PostgreSQL

Setting up a Webserver¶

It’s recommended to run a dedicated webserver software, such as Apache or Nginx, as a reverse proxy in front of the Q application (running through uWSGI). To read how to do this, see instructions on setting up Q with a reverse proxy webserver.

Creating the First User¶

Create the initial user and a “main” organization using:

python3 manage.py first_run

You should now be able to log into GovReady-Q using the user created in this section.

You can also use the Django admin to create organizations.

Other Configuration Settings¶

Set up email by adding to local/environment.json:

"admins": [["Your Name", "you@company.com"]],
"email": {
  "host": "smtp.server.com", "port": "587", "user": "...", "pw": "....",
  "domain": "webserver.example.com"
},
"mailgun_api_key": "...",

Updating Deployment¶

When there are changes to the GovReady-Q software, pull new sources and restart processes with:

# replace $DISTRO with an appropriate value.
# Currently-supported options include "rhel" and "ubuntu"
sudo -iu govready-q /home/govready-q/govready-q/deployment/$DISTRO/update.sh

As root, you can also restart just the Python/Django process:

sudo supervisorctl restart all

But this won’t do a full update so don’t normally do that (it won’t restart the separate notifications process or generate static assets, etc.).