Production Django Command Wrapper

Purpose

Manual Django management commands on MandelBlog production do not inherit the mandelstudio-gunicorn.service systemd drop-in environment.

That matters for Elasticsearch because production search TLS verification is enabled only when this environment variable is present:

ELASTICSEARCH_CA_CERTS=/etc/ssl/certs/elasticsearch-http-ca.crt

Without it, mandelstudio.settings.env.prd intentionally falls back to:

verify_certs=False

This does not affect the live site, but it does cause noisy CLI warnings during operator commands such as django check, showmigrations, and shell sessions.

Standard production command pattern

Use this pattern for manual Django management commands on production:

cd /home/www-mandelstudio/mandelstudio && \
ELASTICSEARCH_CA_CERTS=/etc/ssl/certs/elasticsearch-http-ca.crt \
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mandelstudio.settings.env.prd \
/var/lib/virtualenv/mandelstudio/bin/python -m django <command>

Examples

Run checks:

cd /home/www-mandelstudio/mandelstudio && \
ELASTICSEARCH_CA_CERTS=/etc/ssl/certs/elasticsearch-http-ca.crt \
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mandelstudio.settings.env.prd \
/var/lib/virtualenv/mandelstudio/bin/python -m django check

Inspect migrations:

cd /home/www-mandelstudio/mandelstudio && \
ELASTICSEARCH_CA_CERTS=/etc/ssl/certs/elasticsearch-http-ca.crt \
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mandelstudio.settings.env.prd \
/var/lib/virtualenv/mandelstudio/bin/python -m django showmigrations

Open a shell:

cd /home/www-mandelstudio/mandelstudio && \
ELASTICSEARCH_CA_CERTS=/etc/ssl/certs/elasticsearch-http-ca.crt \
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mandelstudio.settings.env.prd \
/var/lib/virtualenv/mandelstudio/bin/python -m django shell

Run a project command:

cd /home/www-mandelstudio/mandelstudio && \
ELASTICSEARCH_CA_CERTS=/etc/ssl/certs/elasticsearch-http-ca.crt \
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mandelstudio.settings.env.prd \
/var/lib/virtualenv/mandelstudio/bin/python -m django apply_priority_seo_metadata --dry-run

Optional temporary shell helper

For one operator session, you can define a shell helper instead of repeating the full command:

manage_prd () {
  cd /home/www-mandelstudio/mandelstudio || return 1
  ELASTICSEARCH_CA_CERTS=/etc/ssl/certs/elasticsearch-http-ca.crt \
  DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mandelstudio.settings.env.prd \
  /var/lib/virtualenv/mandelstudio/bin/python -m django "$@"
}

Example:

manage_prd check
manage_prd showmigrations oscar_odin_plugin --plan

Scope

This is an operator-only convention.

It does not:

change Django settings
change gunicorn runtime behavior
restart services
alter production data
expose secrets or API keys

Verification

When the command is run with ELASTICSEARCH_CA_CERTS set, the Elasticsearch verify_certs=False warning should not appear in command output.

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