EJ Stack¶

Services¶

The most basic EJ stack consists of four containers running the following services:

Nginx:

The reverse proxy is the only container that needs to be publicly facing the network. It is based on a stock Nginx container that overrides nginx.conf and includes the static resources used by the platform.

Django:

The container with the main Django application starts a Gunicorn application server and must connect with Nginx via either http (default) or sockets.

Postgres:

The default database server. EJ will probably work with other databases supported by Django such as sqlite3 and MySQL, but this was not tested and it is not recommended.

Redis:

The cache database. Used to store sessions, cache templates and other integrations with Django caching subsystem.

Optionally, we support integration with Rocketchat, which adds two more containers:

Rocketchat:

The vanilla container for the Rocketchat platform.

Mongo:

Database used by Rocketchat.

Backend Technologies¶

This section lists the main technologies used in the backend application.

Django:

The web server is based on the Django framework, version 2.0.

Django REST Framework:

EJ exposes a REST api at /api/v1/ powered by Django Rest Framework.

Django Boogie:

Django Boogie is a meta-framework that aims to complement Django and make developers more productive. It is used extensively in EJ and is maintained by one of its developers. Django Boogie cuts boilerplate in API and views creation and offers alternatives to some of Django’s pain points such as settings management (which uses reusable classes in Boogie) and the query language (which has an API inspired on Pandas).

Hyperpython:

Another sister project, it implements an HTML DSL inside Python and is useful to organize HTML snippets to be consumed by templates or used to render whole HTML pages.

Numpy / Pandas / Scikit-learn:

The machine learning algorithms are powered mainly by a traditional Pyadata stack with Numpy, Pandas and Scikit-learn.

Auxiliary Docker images¶

EJ uses some generic images pre-build with useful assets such as webdev tools, Python etc. Those images

ejplatform/python:alpine:

A derivative of debian:buster-slim with Python 3.6 and invoke.

ejplatform/docker-invoke:

A derivative of the standard docker image with Python 3.6 and invoke.

ejplatform/builder:

A derivative of debian:buster-slim with Python 3.6 and tools to build static assets such as Sass and Node.js