Considerations for Production Deployments

This document contains a number of suggestions for deploying MediaGoblin in actual production environments. Consider “Deploying MediaGoblin” for a basic overview of how to deploy MediaGoblin.

Should I Keep Open Registration Enabled?

Unfortunately, in this current release of MediaGoblin we are suffering from spammers registering to public instances en masse. As such, you may want to either:

  1. Disable registration on your instance and just make accounts for people you know and trust (eg via the gmg adduser command). You can disable registration in your mediagoblin.ini like so:

    [mediagoblin]
allow_registration = false

  2. Enable a CAPTCHA plugin. But unfortunately, though some CAPTCHA plugins exist, for various reasons we do not have any general recommendations we can make at this point.

We hope to have a better solution to this situation shortly. We apologize for the inconvenience in the meanwhile.

Security Considerations

Warning

The directory user_dev/crypto/ contains some very sensitive files. Especially the itsdangeroussecret.bin is very important for session security. Make sure not to leak its contents anywhere. If the contents gets leaked nevertheless, delete your file and restart the server, so that it creates a new secret key. All previous sessions will be invalidated.

Alternative init scripts

If your system does not use Systemd, you can use the following command as the basis for an init script:

CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER=true \
 /srv/mediagoblin.example.org/mediagoblin/bin/paster serve \
 /srv/mediagoblin.example.org/mediagoblin/paste.ini \
 --pid-file=/var/run/mediagoblin.pid \
 --server-name=main

The above configuration places MediaGoblin in “always eager” mode with Celery, this means that submissions of content will be processed synchronously, and the user will advance to the next page only after processing is complete. If we take Celery out of “always eager mode,” the user will be able to immediately return to the MediaGoblin site while processing is ongoing. In these cases, use the following command as the basis for your script:

CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER=false \
 /srv/mediagoblin.example.org/mediagoblin/bin/paster serve \
 /srv/mediagoblin.example.org/mediagoblin/paste.ini \
 --pid-file=/var/run/mediagoblin.pid \
 --server-name=main

Members of the MediaGoblin community have provided init scripts for the following GNU/Linux distributions:

Arch Linux

You can reference these scripts to create an init script for your own operating system. Similar scripts will be in your system’s /etc/init.d/ or /etc/rc.d/ directory, but the specifics of an init script will vary from one distribution to the next.

Separate celery

“Deploying MediaGoblin” describes a configuration with a separate Celery process, but the following section covers this in more detail.

MediaGoblin uses Celery to handle heavy and long-running tasks. Celery can be launched in two ways:

  1. Embedded in the MediaGoblin WSGI application [1]. This is the way ./lazyserver.sh does it for you. It’s simple as you only have to run one process. The only bad thing with this is that the heavy and long-running tasks will run in the webserver, keeping the user waiting each time some heavy lifting is needed as in for example processing a video. This could lead to problems as an aborted connection will halt any processing and since most front-end web servers will terminate your connection if it doesn’t get any response from the MediaGoblin WSGI application in a while.
  2. As a separate process communicating with the MediaGoblin WSGI application via a broker. This offloads the heavy lifting from the MediaGoblin WSGI application and users will be able to continue to browse the site while the media is being processed in the background.
[1]The MediaGoblin WSGI application is the part that of MediaGoblin that processes HTTP requests.

To launch Celery separately from the MediaGoblin WSGI application:

  1. Make sure that the CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER environment variable is unset or set to false when launching the MediaGoblin WSGI application.

  2. Start the celeryd main process with

    CELERY_CONFIG_MODULE=mediagoblin.init.celery.from_celery ./bin/celeryd

If you use our example Systemd service files, Celery will be set to the “CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER=false” value by default. This will provide your users with the best user experience, as all media processing will be done in the background.

Set up sentry to monitor exceptions

We have a plugin for raven integration, see the “raven plugin” documentation.