General Deployment Tips

When it comes to deploying your tom for general use, there are a few things you might want to consider.

Choosing a database

By default Django (and thus TOMs) use Sqlite as their database backend. Sqlite is sufficient for the majority of use cases and can scale up to the millions if not billions of rows, as long as you have the disk space.

The one place where Sqlite falls behind other databases is it’s performance under heavy concurrent writes. So if you are writing a TOM that, for example, listens to the ZTF, LSST, and SCOUT alert streams and creates targets from each alert you might want to look into Postgresql or MySQL.

Set your TOM’s hostname in the default site

In your TOM’s admin area (/admin/) on your production TOM you will notice a section called “Sites.” There should be one site object, you should edit it so that its hostname is accurate for production. Some functionalities of the TOM rely on this value to properly set up redirects, etc.

Basic security

If you are exposing your TOM to the internet you should make sure that basic security precautions have been taken. Make sure that any views which expose sensitive data, perform any kind of modification to the database or cause large amounts of server load are properly protected and require authentication.

If you plan on making your TOM open source, take care not to check in any secrets, passwords, or credentials. This includes database settings, API keys, or a multitude of other things that you wouldn’t want to throw out on the internet for everyone to see. Note that if you are using git, removing a secret from a file and then committing it does not remove the secret it will still exist in the repo’s history and be trivially accessible. You will need to clean your repo’s history if you commit and sensitive data.

Enforce basic password requirements (TOMs by default will do this) and encourage your users to exercise basic security measures, like using a password manager and not reusing passwords.