The amazing Django documentation recommends that you use Apache and modwsgi to deploy your webapp. While this is certainly not bad advice, you may not want to use Apache after all. Apache is a beast that eats up a lot of memory, is kind of slow and can’t handle as much traffic. As a fun alternative, I would like to talk about deploying Django on nginx using the gunicorn web server.

Just a quick note before we start: this isn’t an out-there deployment option. I spoke to one of the gunicorn developers and was told that every django hosting company (think ep.io) uses this setup.

Get your server ready

I use Rackspace for small, single server web apps. I created an Ubuntu 10.10 instance with 256MB of RAM. Then, I created a user for my app and added my ssh key to authorized_keys. Basic stuff.

Install nginx

Installing nginx couldn’t be simpler. Latest stable release is provided via a ppa repository.

$ sudo apt-get install python-software-properties -y
$ sudo -s
$ apt-add-repository ppa:nginx/stable
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install nginx
$ exit

Project structure

The user under which the app will run is webapp, so I checkout my app in /home/webapp.

/home/webapp/app
/home/webapp/app/static
/home/webapp/env

Note that I’m using virtualenv to deploy this app.

Configure nginx and gunicorn

The following two files can be distributed with your project.

nginx.conf:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name webapp.org;

    access_log /home/webapp/access.log;
    error_log /home/webapp/error.log;

    location /static {
        root /home/webapp/app;
    }

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8888;
    }
}

Next, I symlinked nginx.conf to the server’s sites-enabled directory.

$ sudo ln -s /home/webapp/app/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enable/webapp.org

This sets up nginx to directly serve the applications’s static files (css, js, etc.). Everything else is proxied to the gunicorn server.

Now gunicorn is a Python HTTP server. It’s super simple and effective. I installed it into the app’s environment.

$ (env) pip install gunicorn

gunicorn.conf.py:

bind = "127.0.0.1:8888"
logfile = "/home/webapp/gunicorn.log"
workers = 3

That’s it! The config files are simple and easy to read.

Running

I then collected all the static files into the static directory:

$ (env) python manage.py collectstatic

I restarted nginx:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

And finally, I ran the gunicorn server:

$ (env) cd /home/webapp/app
$ (env) gunicorn_django -D -c gunicorn.conf.py

And I was good to go.

Notes

You may have to change the permissions on the static directory. Also, the command above starts gunicorn as a deamon - a better way would be to use a monitoring service to start it. Think runit or supervisord. Also, I didn’t include any database specific configurations since that’s indentical to an Apache deployment.