Migrating our database to BIGINT keys

Do you know these blog posts about growing companies that have large-scale outages because they ran out of available IDs for their database rows? This is not one of them. We’re highly committed to making new and exciting mistakes, not repeat the ones we’ve read about a dozen times. This is the story of how we went through that migration before it hurt us.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Technology, PostgreSQL, and Django

Log Aggregation with Grafana Loki

We recently deployed Loki to our infrastructure and in this blog post want to share the pitfalls and tips we discovered.

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Author's profile picture Michael Schönitzer on Technology, Loki, and Linux

Undeleting a file overwritten with mv

It’s been a while since we shared the story of an incident with you, and that’s probably a good thing – most operational incidents we had in the past year were “boring” enough in nature to fix them easily. This time, we’ve got a story of a data loss, caused by pure and simple human error – and the story of how we recovered the data.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Technology, Forensics, and Linux

Brought down by cronjobs – analysis of an outage today

Last night, there was a disruption in the network of the data center our servers run in. We do not yet know the source or exact nature of the disruption, but it probably caused increased latencies and error rates in the connection of our application servers to our database servers. This alone would not be a problem in itself, but it caused a series of other problems that caused a full outage of our system starting approximately at 6:57 CET. I was alerted about the issue (and woken up) at 07:02 CET. At 7:04 CET, the system was already available again, but three of our four application servers were still not working.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Technology, Django, and Linux

Bringing more security to multi-tenant Django applications with django-scopes

pretix is a multi-tenant application: With one software installation, it can handle lots of companies and institutions selling tickets. In pretix, they are called organizers, but in the more general case, we usually speak of “tenants” in the software industry. Building pretix this way is a design choice, we could just as well have created a software that only handles one company and run the software many times on logically or physically seperate systems for every event organizer. We decided to go with multi-tenancy in the software many years ago for a number of reasons.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Technology, Django, and Security

How we protect your ticketing information from third-party trackers

From the very beginning, privacy has been one of the most important design goals of pretix. Privacy is usually best and easiest achieved by just not collecting any unnecessary data that and we give our very best to live by that standard.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Technology, Web, and Privacy

How we automated taking screenshots of Django applications

Both our documentation as well as our website contain a number of screenshots of our software. Taking these screenshots manually is really tedious, since you first need to populate your database with sensible test data, select a proper display resolution and then take screenshots separately for every language our software supports, so we can use them in the localized websites properly.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Technology, Web, Screenshots, and DJango

Test failure: Too many tests?

pretix comes with a test suite of currently 2167 tests. When executing these tests, 81 % of pretix’ codebase is run. These tests are intended to verify that pretix is operating correctly and errors and regressions are spotted early. Having such a test suite saved us from a lot of major problems in the past and will hopefully continue to do so in the future.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Technology and Testing

Building a high-available file storage with nginx, haproxy and lsyncd

In my last blogpost, I described our hosting setup for pretix.eu in detail and talked about the efforts we take to achieve a resistance against failing servers: The system should tolerate the failure of any single server at any given time and keep running. Well, up to now, this was only nearly true.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Technology and CDNs

Migrating our production deployment from MariaDB Galera to PostgreSQL and Patroni

This night, pretix.eu had a planned outage for around 70 minutes to allow us to make a fundamental change to our service architecture. In this blogpost, we want to go into detail on what we changed and why. We hope this might be insightful for you if you run a similar service or if you are just curious about the challenges we experience along the way.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Technology and Databases

Writing your own CUPS printer driver in 100 lines of Python

In version 1.8 of pretix, we introduced shipping management as a new feature for the pretix Hosted and Enterprise editions. With this plug-in, you can choose not to deliver your tickets to your visitors as a downloadable file, but to send them via snail mail instead. Of course, you can just download those tickets as regular-sized PDF files, print them out and ship them, but the feature is usually most interesting if you want to send out high-quality tickets that look good e.g. in a gift wrapping under a christmas tree or pinned to a wall as a souvenier of the event.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Technology and Printers

My little trade show – enterprise sales is magic

Being somehow experienced with software development, we are still early in the process of learning how to get pretix to the right customers and turn pretix into a sustainable and profitable project. As one of many experiments on this journey, we presented at a major trade fair for the first time this week. With this blog post, we want to give detailled insight into the process, our decisions and our new experiences. If you are preparing to go on a trade show for the first time, this might give you valuable insight – or just a fun read.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Business and Sales

Yet another blog?

Welcome to behind.pretix.eu! What is this, you may ask? Yes, pretix already has a blog at pretix.eu but we sometimes want to share some backstage information with you that might be interesting to some of you who maintain open source projects, run software services or create businesses yourself.

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Author's profile picture Raphael Michel on Meta