Crowdbotics Is a React Native + Django App Builder / Deployer

In this episode of Running in Production, Anand Kulkarni goes over his app builder and deployer platform using Django. Over 15,000 customers have built and deployed their apps through it. It’s running on 1,000+ Heroku Dynos and has been up and running since early 2017.

Anand covers having a mono repo for the 100k+ lines of back-end code, switching to an API driven back-end, using Terraform, making use of Heroku’s eco-system and much more.

Topics Include

• 6:59 – Motivation for using Django and Python
• 10:36 – Using the Django admin, apps and having a mono repo on the back-end
• 16:36 – There’s over 110,000 lines of back-end code and a bit of linting
• 24:38 – Using DJ Stripe for Stripe integration
• 28:27 – Switching over to React + Vue after having server rendered Django templates
• 34:20 – It’s hosted on Heroku and uses Redis, Celery, PostgreSQL, Docker and Terraform
• 38:32 – Taking advantage of using full text search within PostgreSQL
• 42:03 – Doing a fair bit of code changes (git commits) within Celery workers
• 50:10 – Picking Heroku, running 1,000+ Dynos and having a low 5 figures monthly bill
• 54:43 – Making sure customer apps stay up even during traffic spikes
• 56:28 – A list of Heroku add-ons that are being used and Cloudflare for a few things too
• 1:03:30 – Using Terraform to provision Heroku resources
• 1:05:59 – Step by step on how new code gets from development to production
• 1:12:42 – Dealing with customer secrets securely
• 1:15:57 – Automated backups for the database and user uploaded files
• 1:19:34 – Sentry handles exception tracking and notifying developers of errors
• 1:22:29 – Best tips? For the important parts of your app, use technologies you know
• 1:27:04 – Check out the Crowdbotics blog

Links

📄 References

• https://yeoman.io/
• https://12factor.net/

⚙️ Tech Stack

• django →
• python →
• react →
• vue →
• circle-ci →
• cloudflare →
• docker →
• heroku →
• papertrail →
• postgres →
• redis →
• s3 →
• sendgrid →
• sentry →
• slack →
• stripe →
• terraform →
• webpack →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework
• https://www.pylint.org/
• https://eslint.org/
• https://github.com/jazzband/django-oauth-toolkit
• https://github.com/pennersr/django-allauth
• https://github.com/dj-stripe/dj-stripe
• https://github.com/celery/celery

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