Marton Kiss 71da74ece2 Initial commit of Ask website

Add ask.openstack.org to openstack-infra. Setup an all-in-one
askbot site based on existing deployment, including apache,
redis,apache solr,postgresql. See askbot.rst for further
details. Refactored to depend on vamsee's puppet solr module.

Depends-On: Iffe07d3a34087cb15151787bc683208425a27594
Change-Id: I36504eac7b953c3cce3e21a3559ac95b1bc12da7

2015-03-09 23:58:30 +00:00

3.5 KiB

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title: Askbot

Askbot

Askbot is a publicly available Q&A support site for OpenStack.

At a Glance

Hosts

https://ask.openstack.org

Puppet

modules/askbot
modules/solr
modules/openstack_project/manifests/ask.pp

Projects

Overview

The site ask.openstack.org based on the officially released askbot pip distribution. The stable deployment is extended with a custom OpenStack theme available at https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/askbot-theme.

System Architecture

+--------+      +----------+
| apache | ---- | mod_wsgi |
+--------+      +----------+
                    |
             +-------------+    +---------------+
             | askbot site |--- | celery daemon |
             +-------------+    +---------------+
            /      |        \
           /       |         \
  +-------+  +------------+  +-------------+
  | redis |  | postgresql |  | apache solr |
  +-------+  +------------+  +-------------+

Apache / mod_wsgi

Serve the incoming http request using the mod_wsgi Python WSGI adapter, through an SSL virtual host. The site vhost also contains url aliases to serve static content of the theme and all uploaded image files, including the site logo.

Askbot site

The Askbot django application, the custom site specific assets live under /srv/askbot-sites/slot0 directory, including the configuration, application level log files, static content, custom OpenStack theme and uploaded files.

The authentication based on Google, Yahoo and Launchpad OpenID providers. Local login and all other providers except Google, Yahoo and Launchpad are disabled in site configuration.

The askbot-theme repository contains just the pure Sass source of the theme, so this must be precompiled by compass Sass tool.

Application management tool can be found under /srv/askbot-sites/slot0/config: python manage.py <command>

Configuration files:

modules/askbot/templates/askbot.vhost.erb
modules/askbot/templates/settings.py.erb

Celery daemon

This upstart based daemon is responsible for async tasks of the Askbot site, and can be managed by standard service management tools: server askbot-celeryd <start|stop|status>

Redis

Askbot is using redis for handling local caching of configuration and page data. It is useful to clear the redis cache with the FLUSHALL command after a service restart.

Postgresql

A postgresql database hosts the content and dynamic site configuration.

Apache Solr

Apache Solr handling the full-text indexes of the site, based on a multi-core setup, and assigning cores for specific languages. Currently the English (en) and Chinese (zh) languages are supported.

Solr schema templates can be found at:

modules/askbot/templates/solr/schema.en.xml.erb
modules/askbot/templates/solr/schema.cn.xml.erb

Operational notes

The askbot website contains a surprisingly askbot based support forum, and a lot of operational related information is available there. Additional maintenance commands:

synchronize db schema: python manage.py syncdb
migrate database between upgrades: python manage.py migrate
rebuild solr index: python manage.py askbot_rebuild_index -l <language-code>
assign administrator right to a user: python manage.py add_admin <user-id>

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