How we are deploying Django projects to AWS

Allan Porras -

Internally, we are constantly looking for the best way to deploy some Django projects to AWS.  Some people prefer to use automated process (yeah! automated deploys).

This is just a step. There are a lot way to do it. Here is the stack. Let’s go!

AWS:
I personally prefer Google Cloud Platform. Probably I will write about that on this blog soon.

I’m using a EC2 instance, with Ubuntu.
I’m clonning the  Git repo under  /home/ubuntu by using the ubuntu user.

Virtualenvwrapper:

Virtual environment is an important requirement. I have used both virtualenv  and virtualenvwrapper; in this case I used virtualenvwrapper, and all Python and pip packages are installed in a separated folder.

Gunicorn:

Gunicorn is just an HTTP server for projects.I have started my Django project on server trough Gunicorn on a local hostname and port (http://localhost:8000).

Supervisor:

I use Supervisor to convert my project in a daemon. That’s it. So, if I restart the server, this daemon will be started automatically.This is my  /etc/supervisor/conf.d/myproject.conf

[program:myproject]
command=/home/ubuntu/myproject/start_gunicorn.sh
autostart=true
stdout_logfile=/home/ubuntu/logs/gunicorn.log
stdout_logfile_backups=20
stdout_logfile_maxbyes=20MB

Start_gunicorn.sh  is just a bash file to launch Django trough Gunicorn. Something like:

gunicorn myproject.wsgi:application -w 3 --bind=127.0.0.1:8000

Nginx:

Nginx is very cool HTTP/Proxy server. I’m using Nginx as a proxy, to serve the local project to the web.I’ts like make enabled  localhost:8000  from  mydomain.com. Nginx is also serving all the Django static files, and make it visible from  /static.

server { listen 80; server_name mydomain.com; client_max_body_size 5M; charset utf8; keepalive_timeout 6; access_log /home/ubuntu/logs/nginx.access.log; error_log /home/ubuntu/logs/nginx.error.log; location / {  proxy_read_timeout 800;  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;  proxy_set_header Host $host;  proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000/; } location /static {  alias /home/ubuntu/myproject/static;  autoindex on; }}

If you need help with your deployment or managing your stack, please contact us.