In this episode of Running in Production, Nick Hnatiw goes over building a password manager with Django and Python. It’s hosted on Heroku and DigitalOcean.

Nick talks about using Django Rest Framework because there’s a web app along with native mobile apps, the value in charging for a product to avoid having your data sold, using HashiCorp Vault to manage user’s private keys and more.

Topics Include

• 5:05 – Motivation for using Django and Python
• 7:15 – The Django admin isn’t perfect but it helps save a lot of time
• 9:16 – Using Django Guardian and Django Rest Framework
• 11:05 – It’s a monolithic API back-end with 1 extra small service to handle private keys
• 13:12 – The back-end is about 1,000 or 2,000 lines of code
• 14:03 – It’ll be a small amount per month to use and all of your data will be private
• 16:42 – Using React on the front-end and why the back-end is an API
• 18:26 – The back-end will likely be open source in the future
• 20:35 – Developing the API back-end alongside the React + mobile app front-ends
• 22:04 – The site is hosted on Heroku’s free tier (including PostgreSQL too)
• 26:43 – The process to develop a feature and then have it be live on the site
• 29:55 – The database and encrypted keys are being backed up
• 30:45 – The Vault service is running on a $5 / month DigitalOcean server
• 34:01 – The server is running Ubuntu and we share a fun trip down memory lane with Gentoo
• 37:04 – Best tips? Discovering Vault and being able to use it to secure user data
• 42:54 – Check out http://passwordspace.com/

Links

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself
• https://www.vaultproject.io/

• django →
• python →
• react →
• digitalocean →
• heroku →
• postgres →
• sendgrid →
• ubuntu →
• webpack →

• https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework
• https://gunicorn.org/

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