Cryptic Crossword Contests

This is a Django server for running cryptic crossword clue-writing contests, of the sort run on the DIY COW forums, among other places.

In addition to standard Django, this project uses:

• django-allauth for social authentication. As of now, it only uses Discord, but adding more providers should just be a matter of updating the settings.py file and creating the relevant DB entries.
• python-decouple to hide secret data from version control. This requires that a .env file exist in the project's root directory (sibling to this README); you can see an example with the expected keys in the .env-example file.
• Celery tasks with a RabbitMQ backend to ensure that contests are automatically closed after enough time has passed. A very short Docker Compose file to run a RabbitMQ server locally during development is provided.
• Simple webhooks to post updates to given Discord servers when contests are started or closed and clues are submitted.

To-Do

I've learned about Django in the years since I started this project, so there are some updates that would be nice.

• Replace the hand-written data validation in cryptics/views.py and cryptics/models.py with Django forms, and possibly replace the view functions with class-based views that have form-handling baked in.
• Replace the default django.contrib.auth.models User with a custom model. (Note that per the docs changing the User model for an existing project is quite messy, so this might not be worth the effort, unfortunately.)
• Add significantly more unit testing, and possibly Travis/GitHub Actions/some other CI system.
• In production, this uses Python's logging.handlers.RotatingFileHandler for logging, but there was an issue that the celery user by default didn't have permission to write to the file in question, causing Celery to immediately fail silently. I was able to use setfacl to fix the issue in the short-term, but a better solution would be to create a dedicated cryptic group on the server or to switch to syslog-based logging (or both).
• I feel like production site is kind of sluggish, so I'd like to do some profiling--there's a decent chance that some of the SQL queries can be optimized without affecting functionality.

Deployment

This is as much a reminder for me as anyone else.

1. Tag current version and push to GitHub (something like git tag v1.0, git push --tags)
2. git pull on the server
3. systemctl --signal SIGHUP kill gunicorn (and also ... celery if the change affects the Celery tasks, which at the moment would just be things that touch the Contest.check_if_too_old method)

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.