Backend Geoportal

Backend Geoportal is an experiemntal REST API for a Web GIS platform, built with Django. It exposes endpoints to query and manage geospatial entities, with session-based user authentication protecting write operations. The project is fully dockerized, with separate configurations for development and production environments.

The spatial ORM provided by the GeoDjango module is not used. Instead, explicit SQL/PostGIS statements are used on an experimental basis.

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📑 Table of contents

• Features
• Project structure
• Build and installation
• Environment variables
• Technologies used
• Notes

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🚀 Features

• 🌐 REST API ready to be consumed by a web or mobile frontend (CORS enabled)
• 📍 Management of the geoportal's geospatial entities (query, create, update, and delete)
• 🔐 Session-based user authentication, with protected endpoints for write operations
• 🐳 Deployment via Docker / Docker Compose, with separate profiles for development and production
• ⚙️ Configuration based on environment variables, with no credentials hardcoded in the code

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📁 Project structure

Backend_Geoportal/
│
├── docker-compose.yml          # Orchestration for the development environment
├── docker-compose.prod.yml     # Orchestration for the production environment
├── scripts/ (*.sh)             # Helper scripts for database management
│
└── juavaal2/                   # Django project
    ├── manage.py
    ├── requirements.txt
    ├── Dockerfile
    │
    ├── juavaal2/                # Project configuration (settings, urls, wsgi/asgi)
    └── appjuavaal2/             # Main API application (views, routes, models, and business logic)

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⚙️ Build and installation

With Docker (recommended)

git clone https://github.com/jrvalza/Backend_Geoportal.git
cd Backend_Geoportal

Development (with hot reload):

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up --build

Production:

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up --build -d

The API will be available at http://localhost:8000/

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🔧 Environment variables

The project reads its configuration from .env / .env.dev / .env.prod files (not included in the repository), containing values such as the database connection, DEBUG mode, and the ports exposed by each environment.

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🧠 Technologies used

Technology	Purpose
	Main language
	Web framework, routing, authentication, and sessions
	Containerized application deployment
	Database
	WSGI server in production

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📌 Notes

• The REST API is designed to work as a standalone service, consumed by a web frontend.
• The separate configuration between docker-compose.yml and docker-compose.prod.yml keeps the development workflow agile without affecting production deployment.
• Access to geospatial data is currently based on pure SQL with PostGIS statements, rather than using the spatial ORM provided by GeoDjango. Migrating or adapting data access to use the GeoDjango module is the next planned step.
• Some settings (CSRF middleware disabled, permissive CORS/ALLOWED_HOSTS, limited exception handling) are relaxed for local/experimental use and should be hardened before any public deployment.