Graphite Message Lab

An intentionally small, interactive application for exercising Project Graphite's complete deployment path.

Visitors send a message privately or ask for it to be published. Django validates it through a JSON API, PostgreSQL persists it, Redis delivers a background job, and a Celery worker counts its words. A message appears on the public wall only when its sender asked for publication and an administrator publishes it in /admin/; the browser polls the API to refresh the wall.

Stack

• Frontend: server-rendered HTML, Tailwind CSS, and a small JavaScript client
• Backend: Django and Gunicorn
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Queue: Redis
• Worker: Celery
• Local packaging: Docker and Docker Compose
• Delivery: GitHub Actions, GitHub Container Registry, and the Project Graphite platform

Run locally

Docker with Compose v2 is the only prerequisite.

cp .env.example .env
docker compose build
docker compose up -d
docker compose exec web python manage.py migrate

Open http://localhost:8000, choose "Public after review" and submit a message. It stays private until you publish it from /admin/ (create an account with ./run manage createsuperuser), and then it appears on the public wall within 15 seconds.

Useful checks:

./run manage test
./run lint
curl --fail http://localhost:8000/up/databases

API

GET /api/messages/ returns the latest 25 published messages. POST /api/messages/ accepts:

{
  "display_name": "Ada",
  "body": "Hello Graphite",
  "requested_visibility": "public"
}

requested_visibility defaults to "private".

Messages are stored and read by the administrator. Do not enter private or sensitive information.

Deployment

Retired. Message Lab proved the Project Graphite deploy path end to end, and its one feature now lives in Graphite Hub as the messages wall at project-graphite.com/messages. Nothing runs at message-lab.project-graphite.com: the registry entry in .graphite.yml is archived with deploy: none, and platform has no deploy/graphite-message-lab/ folder. The repository stays as the case study and runs locally as above.

A push to main still publishes the web and worker images to GHCR; the deploy job then finds no deploy folder in platform and records nothing, by design.

To create an administrator locally:

./run manage createsuperuser

Attribution

The Docker foundation was adapted from Nick Janetakis' MIT-licensed docker-django-example. See UPSTREAM.md and LICENSE.