🐙 Policounter

From estimating crowds to crafting the message—image work for the whole polly-verse.

Policounter began life as a lightweight tool for estimating crowd sizes at protests using open-source computer vision. But like any good organizing effort, it's grown beyond its initial scope.

Now, it's evolving into a one-stop-shop for image handling in the polly-verse: a shared ecosystem for activists, organizers, and visually compelling data.

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🚀 Functionality

🧍‍♂️ policounter

Estimates crowd sizes in protest images using LWCC, a deep-learning-based crowd estimation framework.
See policounter for data structure and LWCC info.

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🎨 pollyvent

Generates printable and shareable event flyers, complete with gradient backgrounds, logos, QR codes, and dynamically scaled text.
See pollyvent for full details and API examples.

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requirements

• numpy>=1.14.0
• torch>=1.6
• gdown>=3.10.1
• torchvision
• pillow>=8.0
• django
  • psycopg[binary]

Policounter/pollyvent Django Deployment Guide (Ubuntu + Gunicorn + Nginx)

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Overview

This document outlines the production deployment process for the policounter Django project, covering initial setup, PostgreSQL, Gunicorn, Nginx, and environment configuration. It also includes a postmortem and cleanup plan for requirements.txt.

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1. Provision Server

• OS: Ubuntu 22.04+

• Create a deploy user:

  adduser deploy
  usermod -aG sudo deploy

• Install dependencies:

  sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
  sudo apt install python3-venv python3-pip nginx postgresql postgresql-contrib

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2. Clone Project & Setup Virtual Environment

cd ~
git clone https://your-repo-url ~/policounter
cd policounter
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

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3. Configure Environment Variables (No export, no quotes)

Create .env at the project root:

SECRET_KEY=your-new-secret-key
DB_NAME=<dbname>
DB_USER=<dbuser>
DB_PASSWORD=your-password

Permissions:

chmod 640 .env
chown deploy:www-data .env

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4. PostgreSQL Setup

sudo -u postgres psql

CREATE DATABASE <dbname>;
CREATE USER <dbuser> WITH PASSWORD 'your-password';
ALTER ROLE <dbuser> SET client_encoding TO 'utf8';
ALTER ROLE <dbuser> SET timezone TO 'UTC';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE <dbname> TO <dbuser>;

Ensure:

GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA public TO <dbuser>;

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5. Update settings.py

import os

SECRET_KEY = os.getenv("SECRET_KEY")
DEBUG = False
ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['your.server.ip', 'localhost', 'your.domain.com']

DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.postgresql",
        "NAME": os.getenv("DB_NAME"),
        "USER": os.getenv("DB_USER"),
        "PASSWORD": os.getenv("DB_PASSWORD"),
        "HOST": "127.0.0.1",
        "PORT": "5432",
    }
}

STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'staticfiles')

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6. Migrations and Collectstatic

source venv/bin/activate
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py collectstatic

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7. Gunicorn Systemd Service

File: /etc/systemd/system/policounter.service

[Unit]
Description=Gunicorn daemon for policounter Django project
After=network.target

[Service]
User=deploy
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/home/deploy/policounter
EnvironmentFile=/home/deploy/policounter/.env
ExecStart=/home/deploy/policounter/venv/bin/gunicorn \
          --access-logfile - \
          --workers 3 \
          --bind unix:/home/deploy/policounter/policounter.sock \
          policounter.wsgi:application

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable and start:

sudo systemctl daemon-reexec
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable policounter
sudo systemctl start policounter

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8. NGINX Configuration

File: /etc/nginx/sites-available/policounter

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name your.domain.com your.server.ip;

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    location /static/ {
        alias /home/deploy/policounter/staticfiles/;
    }

    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/home/deploy/policounter/policounter.sock;
    }
}

Enable site:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/policounter /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
sudo nginx -t
sudo systemctl reload nginx

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9. Firewall and HTTPS

sudo ufw allow 'Nginx Full'

(Optional HTTPS):

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d your.domain.com

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✅ Deployment Complete

Visit: http://your.server.ip/ or http://your.domain.com/ to verify.

🤝 License & Attribution

policounter uses LWCC under the MIT license.

pollyvent builds on Pillow, qrcode, and other open libraries.

pollycounter is written under AGPL-3.0 license

All work is copyright (c) [fuzzygroup].