Deploying Django Apps using Nginx and Apache mod_wsgi Part 2

This is the continuation of our post Deploying Django Apps using Nginx and Apache mod_wsgi Part 1. In this second part we will be configuring Nginx to serve static files and route request to our wsgi process.

Install Nginx

sudo aptitude install nginx

Nginx configuration can be found in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and you should be familiar with its configuration read here Nginx Config. Below is my sample config:

user www-data;
worker_processes  2;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
    # multi_accept on;
}

http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;
    #keepalive_timeout  0;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    tcp_nodelay        on;
    gzip  on;
    gzip_comp_level 2;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
    gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

Setup our site with Nginx

/etc/nginx/sites-available/www.example.com

upstream django {
    # Apache/mod_wsgi running on port 8000
    server 127.0.0.1:8000;
}

server {
    listen xxx.xx.xx.xxx:80; # Modify this to be your servers ip address.
    server_name example.com;
    rewrite ^/(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 permanent;
}

server {
    listen xxx.xx.xx.xxx:80;
    server_name www.example.com;

    # serve media
    location ~ ^/media/(.*)$ {
         alias  /var/www/www.example.com/static/$1;
         #access_log  /var/www/www.example.com/logs/direct.log;
         access_log off;
         expires max;
    }

    location = /favicon.ico {
         alias  /var/www/www.example.com/static/favicon.ico;
    }

    location / {
    include /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
    index  index.html index.htm;
    root /var/www/www.example.com/public_html;
    access_log off;

    if (!-f $request_filename) {
        proxy_pass http://django;
        break;
    }
}

}

This config routes the dynamic requests to our apache mod_wsgi process listening in http://127.0.0.1:8000. We also route request from example.com to www.example.com. We also have include /etc/nginx/proxy.conf a basic proxy configuration, If you want to know more about this read the nginx documentation.

proxy_redirect     off;
proxy_set_header   Host             $host;
proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

client_max_body_size       10m;
client_body_buffer_size    128k;

proxy_connect_timeout      90;
proxy_send_timeout         90;
proxy_read_timeout         90;

proxy_buffer_size          32k;
proxy_buffers              4 32k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size    64k;
proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;

Enable the virtual hosts and we’re done:

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/www.example.com /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/www.example.com

and don’t forget to reload Nginx config:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload

That’s it, you have now deployed a django app using Apache mod_wsig and front-end Nginx.

Problem Encountered

If you had checked the Apache access logs you will notice that all incoming request came from the IP address 127.0.0.1, this is the result of nginx forwarding a dynamic request to http://127.0.0.1:8000. To solve this problem we need another Apache module libapache2-mod-rpaf for the real IP of the incoming request to be visible from Apache.

sudo aptitude install libapache2-mod-rpaf
sudo a2enmod rpaf
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

After you run those commands correctly, incoming requests/connections were logged correct and real IP address will be visible from Apache.