Whole website 404 when DEBUG=False

[rivernews]

Ideas

• When DEBUG=False, django doesn't serve static files at all
• When user visit /, this is routed to django service
  • Only /static/ is routed to S3
• So request / hit django service. If you look at urls.py, you'll get url(r'^.*$', serve, kwargs={'path': 'index.html'}). Several issues here:
  • The serve may not be working at all since DEBUG=False.
  • Even if serve is working, django may have trouble accessing 'path': 'index.html, which seem to access only local filesystem.
  • So it's not even using S3 for index.html. After all, index.html will not be re-routed for /static/index.html. This might explain why DEBUG=True works, because serve might re-route to /static/... for you.

Solutions alternatives:

• Explicitly re-route / to static/index.html in django view
• K8 ingress direct exact-match / to S3's index.html.

[rivernews]

Actions

• Try one of the solution above.
• Turn DEBUG=False again for prod.

Notes: things about static files: S3 can help too, host as a static website, redirection rules, etc. An example for writing routing rules, it's like XML format.

[rivernews]

Ok, we've done:

• DEBUG=false
• url(*) => RedirectView to /static/* in Django

But got:

• Redirected to S3, url is http://shaungc.com/static/, but got the XML format page of S3, basically listing all the S3 root directory files.

Possible solutions

• 🛑 In Django route direct all remaining routes to /static/index.html.
  • Seems DO is a bit down. We'll check later.
  • shaungc.com -> shaungc.com/static/index.html -> shaungc.com, shows a partial frontend page.
• k8 Ingress route / for S3's index.html, the rest route to Django (/static/ still routes to S3).
  • Look at tf doc for kubernetes_ingress, add a new route for / -> S3 static index.html
  • ✅ OK, it's working now:
  • shaungc.com index page OK
  • /django-health-check/ using Django's route OK as well.

The admin portal static file issue is still not working, we'll continue to address that in issue #9 .

[rivernews]

Issue resolved, closing issue.

Code changes are in terraform privisioning repository.

Future:

• We may want to see how to optimize this in nginx K8 ingress resource, since current approach seems not quite elegant.

Reference

• For further inspect, we can look at the K8 nginx ingress resource regex.