New Server

This section is intended for those who have a brand new server or one without any django or python web server services

The following instructions are for Ubuntu 11, but the steps should be translatable to your OS of choice. It also describes a possible web server setup and not the only way to do this as your needs may differ.

Required

• Apache
• nginx
• Python 2.6+
• MySQL
• PIL

Search

• Java 1.6+
• Django Haystack

##Project Dir First make a project dir, i'm going to use /var/www/dev

mkdir /var/www/dev

And a separate static dir

mkdir /var/www/static

##Apache & Nginx The idea here is that nginx will sit in front of everything. Nginx is a lightweight and fast webserver, though for this tutorial, we'll just be using it to serve static files like images and javascript. So Nginx will redirect traffix to apache when it's a django request and just server the static files when not. I believe this is a typical setup. So Apache will listen on port :8080 and Nginx on port :80.

Ubuntu comes packaged with apache 2 already so nothing more is required to be installed. Though we do need to configure it. So we'll need to grab nginx:

sudo aptitude install nginx

###Configure First install mod_wsgi For apache we just need to set up a virtual host on port :8080 so edit the apache.conf file:

<VirtualHost *:8080>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/dev
    WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/dev/wsgi.py
    WSGIPythonPath /var/www/dev
    
    <Directory /var/www/dev>
        <Files wsgi.py>
            Order deny,allow
            Allow from all
        </Files>
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Nginx will have a more fleshed out conf file. So edit /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. You'll only need to edit the server section of the default conf:

...
server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  dev;
    access_log   logs/www.dev.log  main;

    # serve django admin files
    location ~ ^/(media)/  {
      root    /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/contrib/admin;
      expires 30d;
    }

    # serve static files
    location ~ ^/(static)/  {
      root    /var/www;
      expires 30d;
    }

    # pass requests for dynamic content
    location / {
      proxy_pass      http://127.0.0.1:8080;
    }
}
...

Start apache and nginx: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start

##MySQL I'm using MySQL, but you could use postgres if that's what you are already using.