Deployment

Pontoon is designed to be deployed on Heroku. To deploy an instance of Pontoon on Heroku, you must first create an app on your Heroku dashboard. The steps below assume you’ve already created an app and have installed the Heroku Toolbelt.

For quick and easy deployment without leaving your web browser, click this button:

Buildpack

Pontoon uses several buildpacks in a specific order. They are (in order):

  1. heroku-buildpack-apt for installing Subversion.

  2. heroku-buildpack-ssh for setting up the SSH keys necessary for committing to version control.

  3. The official heroku/nodejs buildpack for installing Node.js programs for pre-processing frontend assets.

  4. The official heroku/python buildpack as our primary buildpack.

You can set these buildpacks on your app with the following toolbelt commands:

# Note that we use add and --index 1 to append to the top of the list.
heroku buildpacks:set heroku/python
heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 heroku/nodejs
heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 https://github.com/Osmose/heroku-buildpack-ssh.git#v0.1
heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 https://github.com/mozilla/heroku-buildpack-apt.git#v0.1

Environment Variables

The following is a list of environment variables you’ll want to set on the app you create:

Note

Alternatively, you can put all variables below in a dotenv text file:

VAR="value 1"
OTHER_VAR="other value"

If you do so, you will only have to give the path of this file to Pontoon through the DOTENV_PATH environment variable:

DOTENV_PATH=/path/to/my/config.env
ADMIN_EMAIL

Optional. Email address for the ADMINS setting.

ADMIN_NAME

Optional. Name for the ADMINS setting.

AUTHENTICATION_METHOD

The default value is django, which allows you to log in via accounts created using manage.py shell. Set to ‘fxa’ if you want to use ‘Mozilla Accounts’ (corresponding FXA_* settings must be set). Set to ‘github’ if you want to use ‘GitHub’ (corresponding GITHUB_* settings must be set). Set to ‘gitlab’ if you want to use ‘GitLab’ (corresponding GITLAB_* settings must be set if required). Set to ‘google’ if you want to use ‘Google’ (corresponding GOOGLE_* settings must be set).

BLOCKED_IPS

A comma-separated list of IP addresses to be blocked from accessing the app, for example because they are DDoS’ing the server.

CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER

Controls whether asynchronous tasks (mainly used during sync) are sent to Celery or executed immediately and synchronously. Set this to False on production.

CELERYD_MAX_TASKS_PER_CHILD

Maximum number of tasks a Celery worker process can execute before it’s replaced with a new one. Defaults to 20 tasks.

DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL

Optional. Default email address to send emails from. Default value: Pontoon <pontoon@hostname>.

DISABLE_COLLECTSTATIC

Disables running ./manage.py collectstatic during the build. Should be set to 1.

Heroku’s Python buildpack has a bug that causes issues when running node binaries during the compile step of the buildpack. To get around this, we run the command in our post-compile step (see bin/post_compile) when the issue doesn’t occur.

DJANGO_DEBUG

Controls DEBUG mode for the site. Should be set to False in production.

DJANGO_DEV

Signifies whether this is a development server or not. Should be False in production. Adds some additional django apps that can be helpful during day to day development.

EMAIL_HOST

SMTP host (default: 'smtp.sendgrid.net').

EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD

Password for the SMTP connection.

EMAIL_HOST_USER

Username for the SMTP connection (default: 'apikey').

EMAIL_PORT

SMTP port (default: 587).

EMAIL_USE_TLS

Use explicit TLS for the SMTP connection (default: True).

EMAIL_USE_SSL

Use implicit TLS for the SMTP connection (default: False).

EMAIL_CONSENT_ENABLED

Optional. Enables Email consent page (default: False).

EMAIL_CONSENT_TITLE

Optional, unless EMAIL_CONSENT_ENABLED is True. Title of the Email consent page.

EMAIL_CONSENT_MAIN_TEXT

Optional, unless EMAIL_CONSENT_ENABLED is True. Main text of the Email consent page. You can use that to explain what type of communication to expect among other things.

EMAIL_CONSENT_PRIVACY_NOTICE

Optional. Privacy notice on the Email consent page. It’s possible to use HTML and link to external privacy notice page.

EMAIL_COMMUNICATIONS_HELP_TEXT

Optional. Help text to use under the Email communications checkbox in user settings. It allows to explain what type of communication to expect and to link to deployment-specific privacy notices among other things.

ENABLE_BUGS_TAB

Optional. Enables Bugs tab on team pages, which pulls team data from bugzilla.mozilla.org. Specific for Mozilla deployments.

ENABLE_INSIGHTS

Optional. Enables Insights pages, which present data that needs to be collected by the Collect Insights scheduled job. It is advised to run the job at least once before enabling the tab, otherwise the content will be empty. See the spec for more information.

ERROR_PAGE_URL

Optional. URL to the page displayed to your users when the application encounters a system error. See Heroku Reference for more information.

GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY

Optional. Set your Google Analytics key to use Google Analytics.

GOOGLE_TRANSLATE_API_KEY

Optional. Set your Google Cloud Translation API key to use generic machine translation engine by Google.

GOOGLE_AUTOML_PROJECT_ID

Optional. Set your Google Cloud AutoML Translation model ID to use custom machine translation engine by Google.

MAINTENANCE_PAGE_URL

Optional. URL to the page displayed to your users when the application is placed in the maintenance state. See Heroku Reference for more information.

MANUAL_SYNC

Optional. Enable Sync button in project Admin.

MEDIA_ROOT

Optional. The absolute path of the “media” folder the projects will be cloned into (it is located next to the “pontoon” Python module by default).

MICROSOFT_TRANSLATOR_API_KEY

Optional. Set your Microsoft Translator API key to use machine translation by Microsoft.

NEW_RELIC_API_KEY

Optional. API key for accessing the New Relic REST API. Used to mark deploys on New Relic.

NEW_RELIC_APP_NAME

Optional. Name to give to this app on New Relic. Required if you’re using New Relic.

OPENAI_API_KEY

Optional. Set your `OpenAI API`_ key to add the ability to refine machine translations using ChatGPT.

PROJECT_MANAGERS

Optional. A list of project manager email addresses to send project requests to

PROTOCOL_BUFFERS_PYTHON_IMPLEMENTATION

Required. Must be set to python. Needed for Google AutoML Translation. Learn more on Protocol Buffers Homepage.

SECRET_KEY

Required. Secret key used for sessions, cryptographic signing, etc.

SITE_URL

Controls the base URL for the site, including the protocol and port. Defaults to http://localhost:8000, should always be set in production.

ALLOWED_HOSTS

A list of strings representing the host/domain names the site can serve. Defaults to .localhost, 127.0.0.1, [::1], should always be set in production.

SSH_CONFIG

Contents of the ~/.ssh/config file used when Pontoon connects to VCS servers via SSH. Used for disabling strict key checking and setting the default user for SSH. For example:

StrictHostKeyChecking=no

Host hg.mozilla.org
User pontoon@mozilla.com

Host svn.mozilla.org
User pontoon@mozilla.com
SSH_KEY

SSH private key to use for authentication when Pontoon connects to VCS servers via SSH.

Note

Changing the SSH_CONFIG or SSH_KEY environment variables requires a rebuild of the site, as these settings are only used at build time. Simply changing them will not actually update the site until the next build.

The Heroku Repo plugin includes a rebuild command that is handy for triggering builds without making code changes.

Note

Some environment variables, such as the SSH-related ones, may contain newlines. The easiest way to set these is using the heroku command-line tool to pass the contents of an existing file to them:

heroku config:set SSH_KEY="`cat /path/to/key_rsa`"
STATIC_HOST

Optional. Hostname to prepend to static resources paths. Useful for serving static files from a CDN. Example: //asdf.cloudfront.net.

SUGGESTION_NOTIFICATIONS_DAY

Optional. Integer representing a day of the week on which the send_suggestion_notifications management command will run. 0 represents Monday, 6 represents Sunday. The default value is 4 (Friday).

SVN_LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Path to prepend to LD_LIBRARY_PATH when running SVN. This is necessary on Heroku because the Python buildpack alters the path in a way that breaks the built-in SVN command. Set this to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/.

SYNC_TASK_TIMEOUT

Optional. Multiple sync tasks for the same project cannot run concurrently to prevent potential DB and VCS inconsistencies. We store the information about the running task in cache and clear it after the task completes. In case of an error, we might never clear the cache, so we use SYNC_TASK_TIMEOUT as the longest possible period after which the cache is cleared and the subsequent task can run. The value should exceed the longest sync task of the instance. The default value is 3600 seconds (1 hour).

SYSTRAN_TRANSLATE_API_KEY

Optional. Set your `SYSTRAN Translate API key`_ to use machine translation by SYSTRAN.

TZ

Timezone for the dynos that will run the app. Pontoon operates in UTC, so set this to UTC.

VCS_SYNC_NAME

Optional. Default committer’s name used when committing translations to version control system.

VCS_SYNC_EMAIL

Optional. Default committer’s email used when committing translations to version control system.

Add-ons

Pontoon is designed to run with the following add-ons enabled:

  • Database: Heroku Postgres

  • Log Management: Papertrail

  • Error Tracking: Raygun.io

  • Email: Sendgrid

  • Scheduled Jobs: Heroku Scheduler

  • Cache: Memcachier

  • RabbitMQ: CloudAMQP

It’s possible to run with the free tiers of all of these add-ons, but it is recommended that, at a minimum, you run the “Standard 0” tier of Postgres.

SendGrid Add-on

Pontoon uses SendGrid, which expects the following environment variable:

SENDGRID_PASSWORD

Use SendGrid API key.

Cache Add-on

Pontoon uses django-bmemcached, which expects the following environment variables from the cache add-on:

MEMCACHE_SERVERS

Semi-colon separated list of memcache server addresses.

MEMCACHE_USERNAME

Username to use for authentication.

MEMCACHE_PASSWORD

Password to use for authentication.

Note

By default, the environment variables added by Memcachier are prefixed with MEMCACHIER instead of MEMCACHE. You can “attach” the configuration variables with the correct prefix using the addons:attach command:

heroku addons:attach resource_name --as MEMCACHE

Replace resource_name with the name of the resource provided by the cache addon you wish to use, such as memcachier:100. Use the heroku addons command to see a list of resource names that are available.

RabbitMQ Add-on

Similar to the cache add-ons, Pontoon expects environment variables from the RabbitMQ add-on:

RABBITMQ_URL

URL for connecting to the RabbitMQ server. This should be in the format for Celery’s BROKER_URL setting.

Note

Again, you must attach the resource for RabbitMQ as RABBITMQ. See the note in the Cache Add-ons section for details.

Scheduled Jobs

Pontoon requires several scheduled jobs to run regularly.

Sync Projects

While internal Pontoon DB can be used for storing localizable strings, Pontoon specializes in using version control systems for that purpose. If you choose this option as well, you’ll need to run the following scheduled job:

./manage.py sync_projects

It’s recommended to run this job at least once an hour. It commits any string changes in the database to the remote VCS servers associated with each project, and pulls down the latest changes to keep the database in sync.

Send Deadline Notifications

Pontoon allows you to set deadlines for projects. This job sends deadline reminders to contributors of projects when they are due in 7 days. If 2 days before the deadline project still isn’t complete for the contributor’s locale, notifications are sent again. The command is designed to run daily.

./manage.py send_deadline_notifications

Send Suggestion Notifications

This job sends notifications about newly created unreviewed suggestions that were submitted, unapproved or unrejected in the last 7 days. Recipients of notifications are users with permission to review them, as well as authors of any previous translations or comments of the same string. The command is designed to run on a weekly basis.

./manage.py send_suggestion_notifications

Send Review Notifications

This job sends notifications about newly reviewed (approved or rejected) suggestions to the authors of those suggestions.

The command is designed to run on a daily basis.

./manage.py send_review_notifications

Collect Insights

The Insights tab in the dashboards presents data that cannot be retrieved from the existing data models efficiently upon each request. This job gathers all the required data and stores it in a dedicated denormalized data model. The job is designed to run in the beginning of the day, every day.

./manage.py collect_insights

Warm up cache

We cache data for some of the views (e.g. Contributors) for a day. Some of them don’t get a lot of visits, not even one per day, meaning that the visitors of these pages often hit the cold cache. We use this job to refresh data in the cache every day, because it changes often. The command is designed to run daily.

Clearing the session store

When a user logs in, Django adds a row to the django_session database table. If the user logs out manually, Django deletes the row. But if the user does not log out, the row never gets deleted.

Django does not provide automatic purging of expired sessions. Therefore, it’s your job to purge expired sessions on a regular basis. Django provides a clean-up management command for this purpose: clearsessions. It’s recommended to run this command as a daily cron job.

./manage.py clearsessions

Sync Log Retention

You may also optionally run the clear_old_sync_logs management command on a schedule to remove sync logs from the database that are over 90 days old:

./manage.py clear_old_sync_logs

Provisioning Workers

Pontoon executes scheduled jobs using Celery. These jobs are handled by the worker process type. You’ll need to manually provision workers based on how many projects you plan to support and how complex they are. At a minimum, you’ll want to provision at least one worker dyno:

heroku ps:scale worker=1

Database Migrations

After deploying Pontoon for the first time, you must run the database migrations. This can be done via the toolbelt:

heroku run ./manage.py migrate

Creating an Admin User

After deploying the site, you can create a superuser account using the createsuperuser management command:

heroku run ./manage.py createsuperuser --user=admin --email=your@email.com

You’ll then be prompted to set a password for your new user.

If you’ve already logged into the site with the email that you want to use, you’ll have to use the Django shell to mark your user account as an admin:

heroku run ./manage.py shell
# Connection and Python info...
>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User
>>> user = User.objects.get(email='your@email.com')
>>> user.is_staff = True
>>> user.is_superuser = True
>>> user.save()
>>> exit()

And with that, you’re ready to start Localizing your projects!