An Inventory Management System for an E-commerce Platform

In this episode of Running in Production, Galen Rice walks us through building an internal inventory management system with Django and Python. It’s running on a single bare metal server and has been up and running since 2013.

Galen talks about replacing an Excel sheet with a custom app, using 20 Django apps, taking advantage of the Django admin and deploying everything onto a custom server.

Topics Include

• 5:02 – Motivation for using Django and Python
• 6:49 – Despite being ~6 years old it uses Python 3.x but it also uses Django 1.8
• 10:23 – It’s 1 monolithic app split into about 20 Django apps across ~15k lines of code
• 14:39 – Staff workers are using the Django admin and there’s full text search with PostgreSQL
• 17:44 – It runs nginx on a bare metal server, also bulk CSV imports are done via cron jobs
• 22:52 – Walking us through the deploy process from development to production
• 27:11 – Traffic is served internally over HTTP and nginx serves static files
• 27:49 – Database backups were saved onto S3 and a backup hasn’t had to be used yet
• 30:37 – Taking the application down means 50 people stand around doing nothing
• 31:37 – Best tips? Make the smallest possible changes at a time and plan for having a team
• 34:15 – Galen is on GitHub if you want to see what he’s up to

Links 📄 References

• https://www.manning.com/books/the-mikado-method

⚙️ Tech Stack

• django →
• python →
• centos →
• nginx →
• postgres →
• s3 →
• systemd →

🛠 Libraries Used

• https://www.reportlab.com/opensource/
• https://github.com/python-amazon-mws/python-amazon-mws
• https://gunicorn.org/

Support the Show

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