You may have have heard of Letsencrypt, which is a new SSL certificate authority that provides free SSL certificates that are supported in all modern browsers. This service is also designed to help automate the issuance of SSL certificates. The following describes how to use Letsencrypt to configure auto-renewing SSL certificates...
Articles by Joe Jasinski
Free and Auto-Renewing SSL Certificates: Letsencrypt Quick Setup
You may have have heard of Letsencrypt, which is a new SSL certificate authority that provides free SSL certificates that are supported in all modern browsers. This service is also designed to help automate the issuance of SSL certificates. The following describes how to use Letsencrypt to configure auto-renewing SSL certificates...
Encrypted Postgres Backups
When creating a Postgres Database backup, one convenient approach is to export the database to disk via the pg_dump command. This postgres export file can then be picked up by a regular filesystem backup. A possible security risk with this approach is that your sensitive database data could be situated...
New Django Server Setup: Part 2
In Part 1 of this article, we discussed our choice of typical server stack and the general packages that we find useful upon an initial installation. Part 2 will focus on setting up the site environment and configuring the system services. As mentioned before, at Imaginary, this setup process is normally automated...
New Django Server Setup: Part 1
A core challenge of setting up a Django project is creating a production-worthy server environment and project setup. At Imaginary Landscape, we've put a lot of thought into how to accomplish this task in an intuitive and flexible way. The goal of this article is to detail the default setup...
Django and IPython Notebook
The IPython Notebook is a really cool application, and I've always wanted to use it during Django development and debugging. The only problem is that it requires a lot of dependencies and I feel no need to encumber my production projects with those dependencies for a feature that I only...
Upgrades: Django Old to Django New
Sometimes we are faced with the challenge of upgrading old Django-based projects. The task can be daunting, as a lot has happened in Django within the last few years. Since Django 1.1.1, Django has been through 15 micro releases and 4 minor releases. The term "minor" seems deceptive as a...
Testing As a Different Django User
All types of Django auth do basically the same thing: They associate a browser session ID with a Django user if the user logs-in successfully. I found a neat technique to bypass a Django login by modifying with a Django session, which can be useful for testing purposes. Why is...
Geo Django Quickstart
GeoDjango is a very powerful tool for storing and manipulating geographic data using the Django ORM. It provides a simple API to determine distances between two points on a map, find areas of polygons, locate the points within a polygon, and much more. GeoDjango is fairly well documented on...
Django Admin Snippets
At its minimum, the Django Admin is an effective tool for viewing and manipulating data within a Django database. At its max, it can be a robust application allowing clients and administrators to better manage their web applications. This article aims to highlight some of the admin customizations that...
Security for Mobile Applications
As people put more faith in mobile devices, the impact of security breaches can be all the more devastating. From the perspective of a mobile Web application developer, mobile devices can be an additional entry point into an application. Creating mobile-friendly Web applications with security as a top priority is...