The back-end for my portfolio project, built with Django and Django REST Framework (DRF). This backend handles websocket connections and exposes a REST API to a React front-end. It handles user authentication (OAuth2), data management, and real-time communication using WebSockets, all deployed on AWS via Terraform.
- Django: Handles the entire project's business logic, authentication, task/data routing.
- Django REST Framework (DRF): A robust framework the RESTful API provided to the front-end.
- OAuth2: Manages secure user authentication and token-based session handling via
drf-social-oauth2. - Celery: Task queue for managing background jobs such as email notifications and scheduled tasks.
- Redis: Used as in-memory datastore for the Celery broker, throttling cache, and websocket/chat cache.
- WebSockets: Implements real-time features for the chatbot demo.
- Docker: Both the web server and background task workers are containerized and orchestrated via AWS ECS.
- AWS S3: Stores and serves user-uploaded images. S3 is integrated seemlessly with Django's file storage system.
- AWS RDS (PostgreSQL): Relational database used for data persistence managed via AWS RDS.
- AWS ECS: Containers are deployed on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) with RDS for PostgreSQL.
The back-end exposes WebSocket routes and API endpoints to only the AWS CloudFront distribution through an application load balancer. Some of the key WebSocket routes and API endpoints include:
- /socialauth/: Handles OAuth2 authentication and token management.
- /ws/chat/: WebSocket endpoint for real-time chat functionality using Redis as a message broker and cache.
- /api/v1/user-posts/: Manages CRUD operations for user-generated messages.
- /api/v1/user-images/: Manages CRUD operations for user-uploaded images and generates pre-signed URLs to S3 bucket.
The backend is integrated with GitHub Actions for automated deployment to AWS ECS. The following steps are triggered on each push to the staging or production branches:
- Test: Automated tests using Django’s testing framework for API endpoints, business logic, and database interactions.
- Build and Push: The Django application is containerized and pushed to AWS ECR.
- Migration: Database migrations are ran against AWS RDS through a standalone ECS task.
- Deployment: ECS Tasks are re-deployed with the newest images.
- Monitoring: Application logs and metrics are collected and monitored via AWS CloudWatch.