Scout: Unable to start gunicorn server for production

[andreaswallberg]

Dear all,

I have installed scout on a local server to try it out for a class lab. I have gotten as far as I running it successfully through the demo or using the flask example. However, the command for running it with gunicorn does not seem to work. I get this error:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'wsgi_gunicorn'

[... lots of Python messages ...]

I can not find the documented wsgi_gunicorn.py file anywhere among the files I checked out with git. Is it missing or am I doing something wrong?

In terms of production runs, do you continue using the docker mongodb instance? If so, how do you set up authentication on it?

[northwestwitch]

Hi @andreaswallberg , nice that you're trying out Scout!

Our current setup here at SciLifeLab Solna is not with Docker (for either Scout or the mongo database), but @ninanorgren managed a setup with Docker and LDAP authentication in a prod environment, she can give you some tips perhaps?

We are using Google authentication for our users at the moment, but we might be switching to a new system (LDAP as well?) in the future.

Regarding the gunicorn file, you are right, it's not included in the current repository, and I couldn't find any reference to a file named like that in the past.. We'll need to fix the documentation, sorry!

I think what is supposed to be in the missing file is in scout/scout/server/auto.py. What happens if you try to run

/path/to/gunicorn
    --workers=4                 # for production, 2 for staging
    --bind=":8080"              # port to listen on localhost
    --access-logfile=-          # redirect access log to STDOUT
    --error-logfile=-           # redirect errors to STDOUT
    scout.server.auto:app

?

[dnil]

Cool! We do have a locally adapted production config in our internal server repo; let's see if we can't edit that to be a bit more generic and add to this as well!

[andreaswallberg]

Thanks for the very rapid feedback!

This works for me:

1. Make some edits to the example scoutconfig.py described in the main documentation. For example, put in or comment out the MONGO credentials. In my case, I was never able transform the non-authenticated mongo docker to an instance that accepts credentials when started with "--auth", although I added a user to the database. Only non-authenticated works for me (I guess this is fine for what we hope to do in class).
2. Copy the scoutconfig.py into scout/server/
3. Now run: SCOUT_CONFIG=./scoutconfig.py gunicorn --workers=4 --bind=":8080" --access-logfile=- --error-logfile=- scout.server.auto:app and it starts without error and stays up!

I can not actually check out the web server from where I am located atm but will do so asap later this evening.

[andreaswallberg]

It works. I also got it up and running with my own key and certificate. Great!