Alibaba Cloud Tech Share – How to Deploy AskBot Question and Answer Forum on CentOS 7

Askbot is a question and answer web forum and it looks like StackOverflow Q&A web forums. It is based on Django web framework and written in Python programming language. It is an open source Q&A web forum project maintained and developed by Evgeny Fadeev. Some most popular open source projects like Ask-OpenStack, Ask-Fedora , Ask-LibreOffice and some other sites uses the AskBot to provide support for their users and clients. This project is funded by open source community like Document Foundation to support the development of Askbot.

Create a New User

# adduser alibaba

When installation has done, you can start the MariaDB services.

$ sudo systemctl start mariadb

After that you can enable the MariaDB services to run at every boot.

$ sudo systemctl enable mariadb

You will be prompted for the root password just entering the root password to enter the interactive session with MariaDB database.

$ sudo mysql -u root –p

After that install the Askbot on current directory

(ask) $ sudo askbot-setup

Now collect all files like (.css and .js files) that are static content into base directory location.

(ask) $ python manage.py collectstatic


Now configure the WSGI pass using Apache virtual host. This will serve your askbot website directly by using apache on port 80. Also we have use daemon mode to run the WSGI process that is recommended method to run python based apps using wsgi.py file. The Apache mod_wsgi is the most resource efficient apache handler for the Python or Django web applications.

You must provide read and write permission to the directory.

$ sudo chmod -R g+w /var/www/html/log

Remove default html index file

$ sudo rm -rf /var/www/html/index.html

When all steps are done finally restart your apache services

$ sudo systemctl restart httpd

You can enable the Apache service so that it starts automatically at every boot

$ sudo systemctl enable httpd

Now open the web browser and open it with your FQDN to see your website live on your browser.

http://<Your-SERVER-IP>

Now Askbot appears in your browser.



Cerate first user that will be the admin user



Create a new account at the site this will be your administrator account by hitting create password protected account.



Finally you have sucessfully deployed the AskBot



Congratulation now you have sucessfully deployed the askbot Question and Anser Forum. We have used the Apache Web Server with Mod-WSGI module that is so reliable and we use the Maria-DB as a Database server that is so effective. Finally the AskBot will be your new question and answer forum for your next project.