Django

Deployment

Running Django application with Gunicorn

  1. Install gunicorn

    pip install gunicorn

  2. From django project folder (same folder where manage.py resides), run the following command to run current django project with gunicorn

    gunicorn [projectname].wsgi:application -b 127.0.0.1:[port number]

    You can use the --env option to set the path to load the settings

    gunicorn --env DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=[projectname].settings [projectname].wsgi

    or run as daemon process using -D option

  3. Upon successful start of gunicorn, the following lines will appear in console

    Starting gunicorn 19.5.0

    Listening at: https://127.0.0.1:[port number] ([pid])

    .... (other additional information about gunicorn server)

Deploying with Heroku

  1. Download Heroku Toolbelt.

  2. Navigate to the root of the sources of your Django app. You’ll need tk

  3. Type heroku create [app_name]. If you don’t give an app name, Heroku will randomly generate one for you. Your app URL will be https://[app name].herokuapp.com

  4. Make a text file with the name Procfile. Don’t put an extension at the end.

    web: <bash command to start production server>

    If you have a worker process, you can add it too. Add another line in the format: worker-name: <bash command to start worker>

  5. Add a requirements.txt.

  • If you are using a virtual environment, execute pip freeze > requirements.txt
  • Otherwise, get a virtual environment!. You can also manually list the Python packages you need, but that won’t be covered in this tutorial.

  1. It’s deployment time!

    1. git push heroku master

    Heroku needs a git repository or a dropbox folder to do deploys. You can alternatively set up automatic reloading from a GitHub repository at heroku.com, but we won’t cover that in this tutorial.

    1. heroku ps:scale web=1

    This scales the number of web “dynos” to one. You can learn more about dynos here.

    1. heroku open or navigate to https://app-name.herokuapp.com

    Tip: heroku open opens the URL to your heroku app in the default browser.

  2. Add add-ons. You’ll need to configure your Django app to bind with databases provided in Heroku as “add-ons”. This example doesn’t cover this, but another example is in the pipeline on deploying databases in Heroku.

Simple remote deploy fabfile.py

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It lets you execute arbitrary Python functions via the command line.

Install fabric via pip install fabric
Create fabfile.py in your root directory:

#myproject/fabfile.py    
from fabric.api import *

@task
def dev():
    # details of development server
    env.user = # your ssh user
    env.password = #your ssh password
    env.hosts = # your ssh hosts (list instance, with comma-separated hosts)
    env.key_filename = # pass to ssh key for github in your local keyfile

@task
def release():
    # details of release server
    env.user = # your ssh user
    env.password = #your ssh password
    env.hosts = # your ssh hosts (list instance, with comma-separated hosts)
    env.key_filename = # pass to ssh key for github in your local keyfile

@task
def run():
    with cd('path/to/your_project/'):
        with prefix('source ../env/bin/activate'): 
        # activate venv, suppose it appear in one level higher
            # pass commands one by one
            run('git pull')
            run('pip install -r requirements.txt')
            run('python manage.py migrate --noinput')
            run('python manage.py collectstatic --noinput')
            run('touch reload.txt')

To execute the file, simply use the fab command:

$ fab dev run  # for release server, `fab release run`

Note: you can not configure ssh keys for github and just type login and password manually, while fabfile runs, the same with keys.

Using Heroku Django Starter Template.

If you plan to host your Django website on Heroku, you can start your project using the Heroku Django Starter Template :

django-admin.py startproject --template=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-django-template/archive/master.zip --name=Procfile YourProjectName

It has Production-ready configuration for Static Files, Database Settings, Gunicorn, etc and Enhancements to Django’s static file serving functionality via WhiteNoise. This will save your time, it’s All-Ready for hosting on Heroku, Just build your website on the top of this template

To deploy this template on Heroku:

git init
git add -A
git commit -m "Initial commit"

heroku create
git push heroku master

heroku run python manage.py migrate

That’s it!

Django deployment instructions. Nginx + Gunicorn + Supervisor on Linux (Ubuntu)

Three basic tools.

  1. nginx - free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, with high performance;
  2. gunicorn - ‘Green Unicorn’ is a Python WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX (needed to manage your server);
  3. supervisor - a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems. Used when you app or system crashes, restarts your django / celery / celery cam, etc;

In order ot make it simple, let’s assume your app is located in this directory: /home/root/app/src/ and we’re gonna use root user (but you should create separate user for your app). Also our virtualenvironment will be located in /home/root/app/env/ path.

NGINX

Let’s start with nginx. If nginx is not already on machine, install it with sudo apt-get install nginx. Later on you have to create a new config file in your nginx directory /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourapp.conf. If there is a file named default.conf - remove it.

Bellow code to a nginx conf file, which will try to run your service with using socket file; Later on there will be a configuration of gunicorn. Socket file is used here to communicate between nginx and gunicorn. It can also be done with using ports.

# your application name; can be whatever you want
upstream yourappname {
    server        unix:/home/root/app/src/gunicorn.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
    # root folder of your application
    root        /home/root/app/src/;
 
    listen        80;
    # server name, your main domain, all subdomains and specific subdomains
    server_name   yourdomain.com *.yourdomain.com somesubdomain.yourdomain.com
 
    charset       utf-8;

    client_max_body_size                        100m;
 
    # place where logs will be stored;
    # folder and files have to be already located there, nginx will not create
    access_log        /home/root/app/src/logs/nginx-access.log; 
    error_log         /home/root/app/src/logs/nginx-error.log;
    
    # this is where your app is served (gunicorn upstream above)
    location / {
        uwsgi_pass  yourappname;
        include     uwsgi_params; 
    }

    # static files folder, I assume they will be used
    location /static/ {
        alias         /home/root/app/src/static/;
    }
 
    # media files folder
    location /media/ {
        alias         /home/root/app/src/media/;
    }

}

GUNICORN

Now our GUNICORN script, which will be responsible for running django application on server. First thing is to install gunicorn in virtual environment with pip install gunicorn.

#!/bin/bash

ME="root"
DJANGODIR=/home/root/app/src # django app dir
SOCKFILE=/home/root/app/src/gunicorn.sock # your sock file - do not create it manually
USER=root
GROUP=webapps
NUM_WORKERS=3 
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=yourapp.yoursettings
DJANGO_WSGI_MODULE=yourapp.wsgi  
echo "Starting $NAME as `whoami`"
 
# Activate the virtual environment
cd $DJANGODIR

source /home/root/app/env/bin/activate
export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=$DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE
export PYTHONPATH=$DJANGODIR:$PYTHONPATH
 
# Create the run directory if it doesn't exist
RUNDIR=$(dirname $SOCKFILE)
test -d $RUNDIR || mkdir -p $RUNDIR
 
# Start your Django Gunicorn
# Programs meant to be run under supervisor should not daemonize themselves (do not use --daemon)
exec /home/root/app/env/bin/gunicorn ${DJANGO_WSGI_MODULE}:application \
  --name root \
  --workers $NUM_WORKERS \
  --user=$USER --group=$GROUP \
  --bind=unix:$SOCKFILE \
  --log-level=debug \
  --log-file=-

in order to be able to run gunicorn start script it has to have execution mode enabled so

sudo chmod u+x /home/root/app/src/gunicorn_start

now you will be able to start your gunicorn server with just using ./gunicorn_start

SUPERVISOR

As said in the beginning, we want our application to be restarted when fails by a supervisor. If supervisor not yet on server install with sudo apt-get install supervisor.

At first install supervisor. Then create a .conf file in your main directory /etc/supervisor/conf.d/your_conf_file.conf

configuration file content:

[program:yourappname]
command = /home/root/app/src/gunicorn_start
user = root
stdout_logfile = /home/root/app/src/logs/gunicorn_supervisor.log
redirect_stderr = true

Quick brief, [program:youappname] is required at the beginning, it will be our identifier. also stdout_logfile is a file where logs will be stored, both access and errors.

Having that done we have to tell our supervisor that we have just added new configuration file. To do it, there is different process for different Ubuntu version.

For Ubuntu version 14.04 or lesser than it, simply run those commands:

sudo supervisorctl reread -> rereads all config files inside supervisor catalog this should print out: yourappname: available

sudo supervisorctl update -> updates supervisor to newly added config files; should print out yourappname: added process group

For Ubuntu 16.04 Run:

sudo service supervisor restart

and in order to check if your app is running correctly just run

sudo supervisorctl status yourappname

This should display :

yourappname RUNNING pid 18020, uptime 0:00:50

To get live demonstration of this procedure, surf this video.

Deploying locally without setting up apache/nginx

Recommended way of production deployment calls for using Apache/Nginx for serving the static content. Thus, when DEBUG is false static and media contents fail to load. However, we can load the static content in deployment without having to setup Apache/Nginx server for our app using:

python manage.py runserver --insecure

This is only intended for local deployment(e.g LAN) and should never be used in production and is only available if the staticfiles app is in your project’s INSTALLED_APPS setting.

This modified text is an extract of the original Stack Overflow Documentation created by the contributors and released under CC BY-SA 3.0 This website is not affiliated with Stack Overflow