Deploying a Django application in VM

For development server we can use the built-in Django server. But for production we need to use a web server like Apache or Nginx. In this tutorial we will use Nginx.

• For safety create a new production branch in git and push it to the server.

git branch prod
git checkout prod
git push origin prod

• Now we have to install gunicorn then we can call it directly

pip install gunicorn

• Our project have a wsgi.py file, so we can directly start wsgi server

cd backend/anwesha
gunicorn anwesha.asgi

• We have some pending configuration in wsgi server, but lets setup nginx first

sudo apt-get install nginx

• Now we have to configure nginx to serve our application. We will use a reverse proxy to serve our application. We will use a file named anwesha.conf in /etc/nginx/sites-available/ directory. This file will contain the following configuration

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name backend.anwesha.live;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
    }
}

• Now we have to enable this configuration by creating a symbolic link in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ directory

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/anwesha.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

• Now we have to restart nginx server

sudo systemctl restart nginx

• Now we have a reverse proxy that serves forwards all request at port 80 to port 8000

• Before moving to wsgi configuration, lets setup ssl certificate with letsencrypt. We will use certbot to generate ssl certificate. We will use nginx plugin to generate certificate.

sudo apt-get install certbot python3-certbot-nginx

• Now we have to generate certificate

sudo certbot --nginx -d backend.anwesha.live

• we should add it to crontab to renew certificate automatically

sudo crontab -e

• Add the following line to crontab

0 0 * * * /usr/bin/certbot renew --quiet

• Now that our server is running fine, we have some pending configuration in wsgi server. We have to configure gunicorn to serve our application. I am keeping the filename as ./conf/gunicorn.conf.py and it is in the same directory as manage.py.

wsgi_app = 'anwesha.wsgi'
bind = '0.0.0.0:8000'
workers = 4
loglevel = "debug"
keep-alive = 60
threads = 4
pid = './conf/gunicorn.pid'
access-logfile = './conf/gunicorn-access.log'
capture_output = True

• We can demonize and run in background, but for this case i’ll run in screen terminal.
• Now we are ready to start our server with gunicorn as deamon

gunicorn -c ./conf/gunicorn.conf.py

• Push the prod branch.