Deployment

This guide covers running OLDP in production. For local development use Getting Started; for the containerised quickstart see Docker & Podman. All environment variables referenced here are documented in the Configuration reference.

Overview

A production OLDP deployment consists of:

the OLDP app (Django, served by an application server such as Gunicorn),
a relational database (MariaDB/MySQL recommended),
Elasticsearch 7.17.x for search,
optionally Redis as the cache backend and a CDN / reverse proxy (e.g. Nginx) in front of the app.

The shipped docker-compose.yaml defines the app, db (MariaDB) and search (Elasticsearch) services and is a good starting point for a single-host deployment.

Production configuration

Select the production settings class and provide the required secrets:

export DJANGO_CONFIGURATION=ProdConfiguration
export DJANGO_SECRET_KEY="<a long random secret>"
export DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS="de.openlegaldata.io"
export DJANGO_SITE_URL="https://de.openlegaldata.io"
export DATABASE_URL="mysql://oldp:<password>@db/oldp"
export DJANGO_ELASTICSEARCH_URL="http://search:9200/"

When deploying the German site, point Django at the theme settings instead and keep DJANGO_CONFIGURATION at the theme’s production class (see The OLDP ecosystem):

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=oldp_de.settings
export DJANGO_CONFIGURATION=ProdDEConfiguration

See the Configuration reference for caching (Redis), email, MCP rate limits, logging and CDN cache settings.

First-time setup

Prepare the database, assets and translations:

# Apply database migrations
./manage.py migrate

# Build front-end assets and collect static files
./manage.py compress
./manage.py collectstatic --no-input

# Compile translations (needed for production)
./manage.py compilemessages --l de --l en

# Build the search index
./manage.py rebuild_index

With Docker Compose the equivalent steps are available as Make targets (make migrate, make rebuild-index, make compile-locale).

Create an administrator account:

./manage.py createsuperuser

Deploying updates

When rolling out new code:

Back up the database (and review test/CI status before deploying).
Pull the new code or container image.
Run ./manage.py migrate for any schema changes.
Rebuild assets if they changed: ./manage.py compress and ./manage.py collectstatic --no-input.
Run ./manage.py update_index (incremental) or ./manage.py rebuild_index (full) if search mappings changed.
Restart the application server.

Production checklist

[ ] DJANGO_CONFIGURATION=ProdConfiguration (or the theme’s prod class)
[ ] DJANGO_SECRET_KEY set to a strong, secret value
[ ] DJANGO_DEBUG=False (implied by the prod configuration)
[ ] DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS and DJANGO_CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS restricted to your domains
[ ] DJANGO_SITE_URL set to the public HTTPS origin (also used for MCP OAuth discovery)
[ ] Database backups configured
[ ] Elasticsearch reachable and index built
[ ] TLS terminated at the proxy/CDN; static files served efficiently
[ ] Cache backend chosen (DJANGO_CACHE_BACKEND=redis for multi-process deployments)

Operations

Elasticsearch — reindexing, realtime sync, index fields.
Sitemaps — XML sitemaps and search-engine pinging.
Data Dumps & Bulk Downloads — exporting snapshots with dump_api_data.
Data Repairs — auditing and fixing rows an ingestion bug left behind.

Going further

For tuning the application server, reverse proxy, database, Elasticsearch and Redis beyond Django defaults, see the internal Performance notes. These are engineering notes rather than a prescriptive configuration — benchmark against your own traffic.