Go – Django SAAS projects

databasedjangosaas

I am almost done developing a Django project (with a few pluggable apps).

I want to offer this project as a SaaS (something like 37signals.com).

i.e: customer1.product1.com , customer2.product2.com etc

product1 could be the basecamp
product2 could be highrise
and so on.

I want to know how the project should be structured for these products.

Should there be a single project under which all products will be an application.
—- OR —-
Should I be making different projects for all the products.

Also interms of database.. should all the products look into a single database or we should have seperate databases for each product.

I am looking out for the most efficient and scalable way to do this.

Thanks

Best Answer

If you want the apps to interact in any way (e,g, share user accounts), they need to be on the same database. Until Alex Gaynor's great work on multiple database support gets merged into trunk, Django doesn't support multiple databases.

Along the same lines, Django's sites framework may be of interest to you. Without any more information about your intentions, it's difficult to give any better advice.

Related Solutions

Go – Django deploying as SaaS (basecamp style)

Your requirements aren't at all clear but I'll assume you aren't doing anything tricky and also assume your "project1", "project2" are customer names which won't need any special branding.

First, about your ideas:

You probably won't need to use the sites framework unless each site is branded differently. The site framework works well doing what it was designed to do, which is present different views of a common set of data.
This would work but probably is not the best approach IMO.
This is unmanageable.

Now, this is a really hard topic because there are so many issues. A decent place to start reading is the High Scalability Blog and especially relevant for you would be the post on 37signals Architecture.

Finally, here's what I am doing in a small SaaS app (that doesn't need extreme scalability):

Use the sites framework (because user pages will be branded by the partner/reseller and each partner has a unique login page)
Use mod_wsgi to minimize resource usage from all the Django instances.
Instead of middleware I put a common code at the top of every view that identifies the company of the user. I need this for logic in the views which is why I don't think it's useful in middleware.

Python – How to check Django version

Django 1.5 supports Python 2.6.5 and later.

If you're under Linux and want to check the Python version you're using, run python -V from the command line.

If you want to check the Django version, open a Python console and type

>>> import django
>>> django.VERSION
(2, 0, 0, 'final', 0)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Go – Django deploying as SaaS (basecamp style)

Python – How to check Django version

Related Topic