The CMS Front End for Lionel Trains' Products

In this episode of Running in Production, Mark Miscavage talks about building a site to display hundreds of thousands of full text searchable products for Lionel. The site is powered by Django with a custom open source CMS. It’s been up and running since 2015 and is hosted on AWS.

The agency Mark worked at developed 100+ Django sites, including sites for the Avatar movie along with Hunger Games.

Topics Include

• 3:43 – Building a custom CMS / Django admin and open sourcing the Scarlet library
• 9:16 – Hundreds of thousands of trains, cars and product SKUs are on the CMS driven site
• 13:27 – Motivation for making a monolithic Django app instead of using Magento
• 16:32 – Using Solr to full text search through hundreds of thousands of products
• 20:30 – It’s primarily a server rendered app using Django templates and Ember
• 25:04 – Master / slave PostgreSQL set up using RDS and they use other AWS resources
• 29:42 – Load balancing, dealing with thousands of visitors and heavily caching responses
• 33:53 – Writing a custom open source framework called red-fab-deploy to deploy the app
• 37:59 – The EC2 web servers are using Ubuntu and have t2.medium’ish specs
• 41:35 – Rsync’ing files over to the server, the entire deploy process and testing
• 50:16 – Backing up admin uploaded files and the database, along with using Sentry for errors
• 54:09 – Dealing with secret keys and code reviews while self hosting BitBucket
• 56:44 – Best tips? Start with a base application and server architecture to help estimates
• 58:44 – Also know when to ask for help (such as hiring a contractor or asking questions)
• 1:00:24 – You can find Mark on Twitter @chick3ndinn3r

Links

📄 References

• https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

⚙️ Tech Stack

• django →
• python →
• ember →
• aws →
• cloudfront →
• elasticache →
• nginx →
• postgres →
• rds →
• redis →
• route53 →
• s3 →
• sentry →
• solr →
• ubuntu →
• webpack →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/django-haystack/django-haystack
• https://gunicorn.org/

Support the Show

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