Configuring uwsgi, nginx for django project

This post is about setting up Nginx and uwsgi for a django project.

Some conventions that I have sticked to while doing so are written down here. First of all I will be creating a user named ubuntu and a group named ubuntu. This ubuntu user will be responsible for running nginx as well as uwsgi. This is necessary so that the socket created between nginx and uwsgi does not get trapped in Permission denied error. Also I am assuming that the server is a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04. Lets begin with the steps:

• Create a user named ubuntu.

adduser ubuntu
gpasswd -a ubuntu sudo

• Install the following packages

sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo pip install uwsgi
sudo apt-get -f install nginx-full

• Clone the repository in the home directory of ubuntu user. Assuming that name of the project is explore-webserver.

git clone https://github.com/staranjeet/explore-webserver.git

• Configure uwsgi now. Create two folders

mkdir -p /etc/uwsgi/apps-available /etc/uwsgi/apps-enabled

• Create a config ini file for your project in sites-available folder. Idea is to create to config files in available folder and then create symlink for these in enabled folder. The file explore-webserver.ini should look something like this

[uwsgi]
project = explore-webserver
base = /home/ubuntu
uid = ubuntu
gid = ubuntu

chdir = %(base)/%(project)
home = %(base)/%(project)/pyenv
module = %(project).wsgi:application
env = DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=settings.live

master = true
processes = 3
socket = %(base)/%(project)/%(project).sock
chmod-socket = 664
vacuum = true

• Create a upstart script for uwsgi in /etc/init folder. This script is created to automatically start the service at boot plus we can manually start/stop or restart/reload the service. Lets name this script as uwsgi.conf.

description "uWSGI application server in Emperor mode"

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]

setuid ubuntu
setgid ubuntu

exec /usr/local/bin/uwsgi --emperor /etc/uwsgi/apps-enabled --daemonize /var/log/uwsgi/app/explorewebserver.log

• Configure nginx now. Nginx also follows the sites-available and sites-enabled convention. In /etc/nginx/sites-available folder, create a file named explore-webserver.

server{
        listen 80;
        server_name server_ip_address_or_domain_name;

        location / {
                include uwsgi_params;
                uwsgi_pass unix:/home/ubuntu/explore-webserver/explore-webserver.sock;
        }

        location /static {
                root /home/ubuntu/explore-webserver;
        }

        location /media {
                root /home/ubuntu/explore-webserver/explorewebserver;
        }
}

• Check whether this config is correct or not by

sudo nginx -t

• Create a soft link to this file in sites-enabled directory by

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/explore-webserver /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

• Now change the user in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf from www-data to ubuntu

user ubuntu;

• Now start uwsgi by

sudo service uwsgi start

• Restart nginx by sudo service nginx restart

Note: Make sure that all directories(socket and logs) are owned by the same user(here ubuntu).