In this post, we will see how to use Nginx with Gunicorn to serve Django applications in production.

Django is a very powerful web framework and ships with a server that is able to facilitate development. This development server is not scalable and is not suited for production. Hence we need to configure Gunicorn to get better scalability and nginx can be used as a reverse proxy and as a web server to serve static files. Let's get started

Before you follow the steps outlined below, I will assume that you have already configured your Ubuntu server with a non-root user and firewall as outlined here.

Step 1 - Installing python and nginx

Let's update the server's package index using the command below:

sudo apt update

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sudo apt install python3-pip python3-dev nginx

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This will install Python, pip and Nginx server

Step 2 - Creating a Python virtual environment

sudo pip3 install virtualenv

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This will install a virtual environment package in python. Let's create a project directory to host our Django application and create a virtual environment inside that directory.

mkdir ~/projectdir
cd ~/projectdir

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virtualenv env

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A virtual environment named env will be created. Let's activate this virtual environment:

source env/bin/activate

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Step 3 - Installing Django and Gunicorn

pip install django gunicorn

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This installs Django and Gunicorn in our virtual environment

Step 4 - Setting up our Django project

At this point, you can either copy your existing Django project into the project dir folder or create a fresh one as shown below:

django-admin startproject textutils ~/projectdir

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Add your IP address or domain to the ALLOWED_HOSTS variable in settings.py.

If you have any migrations to run, perform that action:

~/projectdir/manage.py makemigrations
~/projectdir/manage.py migrate

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Let's test this sample project by running the following commands:

sudo ufw allow 8000

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This opens port 8000 by allowing it over the firewall. Let's start our Django development server to test the setup so far:

~/projectdir/manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

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Step 5 - Configuring Gunicorn

Let's test Gunicorn's ability to serve our application by firing the following commands: Find the wsgi file in the main project folder

gunicorn --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 textutils.wsgi

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This should start Gunicorn on port 8000. We can go back to the browser to test our application. Visiting http://<ip-address>:8000 shows a page like this:

Deactivate the virtualenvironment by executing the command below:

deactivate

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Let's create a system socket file for Gunicorn now:

sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/gunicorn.socket

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Paste the contents below and save the file

[Unit]
Description=gunicorn socket

[Socket]
ListenStream=/run/gunicorn.sock

[Install]
WantedBy=sockets.target

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Next, we will create a service file for Gunicorn

sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/gunicorn.service

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Paste the contents below inside this file:

[Unit]
Description=gunicorn daemon
Requires=gunicorn.socket
After=network.target

[Service]
User=harry
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/home/harry/projectdir
ExecStart=/home/harry/projectdir/env/bin/gunicorn \
          --access-logfile - \
          --workers 3 \
          --bind unix:/run/gunicorn.sock \
          textutils.wsgi:application

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

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Lets now start and enable the Gunicorn socket

sudo systemctl start gunicorn.socket
sudo systemctl enable gunicorn.socket

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Step 6 - Configuring Nginx as a reverse proxy

Create a configuration file for Nginx using the following command

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/textutils

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Paste the below contents inside the file created

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.codewithharry.in;

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location /static/ {
        root /home/harry/projectdir; or either use alias
        alias /home/harry/projectdir;
    }

    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/run/gunicorn.sock;
    }
}

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Activate the configuration using the following command:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/textutils /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

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Restart Nginx and allow the changes to take place.

sudo systemctl restart nginx