How to host a Django project in a subpath? - django

Question

I am building an API with Django REST framework which is served via Gunicorn and Nginx. The project "exampleproject" has to run at a subpath such as: https://100.100.100.100/exampleproject (example IP address). I do not have a domain name registered for the IP.
Currently, the start page renders as expected at https://100.100.100.100/exampleproject. However a the resource path for "products" does not work. Instead of https://100.100.100.100/exampleproject/products the start page displays https://100.100.100.100/products - which does not work.
I configured the subpath for exampleproject in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default as follows:
server {
# ...
location /exampleproject/ {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8007/;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
}
When I manually visit https://100.100.100.100/exampleproject/products Nginx records the following in /var/log/nginx/access.log:
"GET /products/ HTTP/1.1" 404 151 "-"

Answer 1

I found here that one needs to add the following setting to Django's configuration in settings.py:
FORCE_SCRIPT_NAME = '/exampleproject'
This seems to rewrite all paths for nested resources.

Answer 2

Just remove the trailing slash from the proxy pass URL, like this:
proxy_pass http://localhost:8007;
If proxy_pass is specified without a URI, the request URI is passed to the server in the same form as sent by a client when the original request is processed, then keeping the /exampleproject/ part.
See: http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#proxy_pass
Then you will need to configure Django to understand the URLs under /exampleproject/.
First, you can prepend the subpath to all URLs by updating the urls.py file like this:
urlpatterns = [url(r'^exampleproject/', include(urlpatterns))]
And, in case you are serving statics and media just update in the settings:
MEDIA_URL = '/exampleproject/media/'
STATIC_URL = '/exampleproject/static/'
Of course you can create a custom setting to replicate this or to make the app work without a subpath as well, I believe this is a better solution than FORCE_SCRIPT_NAME because in that case I found we need to update the Django URLs anyways.