I am writing a backend web api for a mobile app. It should support HTTPS. Most of my experience in .NET, but for this one I want to use Go/Golang. I have a sample service ready, now I need to make sure that it is production ready.
In .NET I will just use IIS, but I have no clue what would be a good approach for Go.
Should I have nginx as reverse proxy, or I better use FastCGI ? And how to make sure that my go app is up and will run on system reboot ? should I use upstart or something similar ?
I've been using Nginx FastCGI with a Go webservice - they work well together. It's no harder to set up than HTTP reverse proxying - except for having to learn how to do it. The performance ought in principle to be a lot better, but I have no measurements to justify that hunch. My web service can work in both HTTP mode and FastCGI mode (one or other at a time), so I suppose I ought to do some benchmarking (note to self!).
If you want proper system startup (and you should), you need to learn how init scripts work. I sometimes cheat and start with an existing working script someone else wrote for a similar application and customise it to work with mine.
I've used nginx as a reverse proxy for my Go projects. I've found that it's a lot easier to set up useful server settings such as TLS, compression, etc., in nginx rather than as a pure Go server.
Keeping it alive on server reboot is a more complicated question. I would suggest learning how to write a script/whatever for your server's init daemon and just doing it that way.
Related
To this point, I just created and played my Django server in my localhost, like setting up a basic server Linux distro on my another device and testing etc.
However, I also heard of server applications like apache2 or nginx. The thing I wonder about is: Do I really need to use one of them in production? I want to buy (or rent?) a VPS service, then deploy (or publish?) my project on that server. The questions on my head are:
Running server with manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:80 means it does not make my application worldwide? An server application (or whatever it is) makes it accessible outside?
Or a server application is simply needed for better performance, optimization etc. ?
Simply, why do I need to use apache2 or nginx to deploy my project?
It's a long story. In few words:
Running your project on localhost surely wont make it worldwide accessible, since at least you need a public address for your server, but not a local one.
Speaking honestly it is not a problem to run a site in pro using django built-in server. But, as you can read in docs, it is strongly NOT recommended. Why? Because it was developed specially for testing. It is written in python (slow enough for web server) and not suitable for handling multiple queries to the server and it is only a matter of time when it will crash. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons like cache and access settings, redirects and others.
I've put together a Django app that was intended to run on Pythonanywhere. However, I soon found out that Pythonanywhere's free plan blocks the remote sites which I intend to interact with, so I decided running the app on a local machine would be good enough for my purposes.
Now, I know that Django's development server isn't meant to be run in a production setting. So, what server daemon do I run on the aging Windows workstation the app's probably gonna be deployed to? Apache, lighttpd, Cherokee? Something else?
My first priority here is conserving system resources as much as I can; I'm probably also going to use Python's built-in sqlite3 instead of MySQL.
Personally I deploy Django with fcgi and Nginx. Nginx offers various strategies to conserve system resources; its use as reverse proxy is well documented and widely used.
The question/answer pair here might help you clear some initial questions about the various components when deploying Django.
Sorry to hear you can't use PythonAnywhere's free version :-(
I'll second the usage of nginx; it's what we use as the front-end for PA. However, we use uwsgi for the backend. It works really well for us and is very easy to configure.
I've heard of these three giant technologies would allow developers to build pub/sub paradigm which result in rapid server push experience.
I've got background on Django, but non of the other two. So just wondering, where can I kick off?
I currently use Gunicorn as django server, uses Nginx as a proxy to serve static files, uses Haproxy as a front-end load balancer. After I adopt new technology stack, can I keep them still?
You will probably encounter issues using Socket.io (which will try to use websocket) with Nginx. Nginx 1.0 does not support proxying of HTTP/1.1. You can use tcp_proxy to work around it. You might be able to find some forks for Nginx 1.1 that have websocket support though.
Check out this and this.
Start here:
http://gevent-socketio.readthedocs.org
and here:
https://github.com/abourget/gevent-socketio
There are some Django examples as to how to get started. Your tech. stack should allow you to run this without much problems.
Concerning the built in debugging server started with the manage.py runserver command, the Django docs state, "DON’T use this server in anything resembling a production environment."
If I wanted to develop a Django application over ssh on a remote machine, would using Nginx as a proxy to a running Django debug server be a reasonable thing to do? Is the Django debug server insecure, or just not built to handle large amounts of traffic?
From the Django docs:
DO NOT USE THIS SERVER IN A PRODUCTION SETTING. It has not gone through security audits or performance tests. (And that's how it's gonna stay. We're in the business of making Web frameworks, not Web servers, so improving this server to be able to handle a production environment is outside the scope of Django.)
So, that answers the latter two questions. As for the former, it depends on how your debug server is set up. If your server is exposed to the public Internet, doesn't have a firewall blocking port 8000, and you intend to use runserver with something other than the default 127.0.0.1 address, set up a more 'proper' application stack.
If you're going to use nginx, why not just use the suggested FastCGI configuration so that your debug environment will be more similar to the future production environment?
Modern web servers have all sorts of features, related to both security and performance, that the Django development server does not. It is a stripped-down, very basic, single-threaded server for the purposes of development. Hence why the docs say to not use it in a production setting.
However, people get way to afraid of this statement. The key defining point is that it's for development. Whether that development takes place on your local machine or a remote VPS or an entire cluster is besides the point.
If the server is publicly available, it will be open to hacking, breaches, DoS attacks, etc. But, if what's there isn't of any importance, just a development site running on dummy data, it doesn't matter. So, yes, you can use the development server on your remote server for development purposes. There's nothing at all wrong with that. My only caution would be to avoid using production data (such as using a dump from your production database to develop against) because that data could be compromised. Otherwise, it's no big deal.
Is the Django debug server insecure, or just not built to handle large amounts of traffic?
IT IS BOTH INSECURE AND NOT INTENDED FOR HEAVY TRAFFIC!
It might take care of a few of the issues by hiding the testing server behind a proxy, but if you're going to that much trouble you've done about the same amount of work as you need to do it right... right being WSGI. Use mod_wsgi, gunicorn, or check this out for more bleeding-edge solution: http://bartek.im/blog/2012/07/08/simplicity-nginx-uwsgi-deployment.html. Whatever you do.... DON'T USE THE DJANGO TEST SERVER FOR PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS!
I have a Django web application which should be easy to install on Linux systems. The app does not need much performance. It is just a simple web GUI for some services. So a full-blown deployment with Apache is not needed. I am looking for a lightweight web server that has little or no configuration; just like the Django development server.
It should be possible to run it as daemon, though.
Any suggestions?
You can use Quick and dirty multi-threaded Django dev server.
But, configuring apache or fastcgi to server django applications is not a hard thing, so you should really do that.
I would use Green Unicorn with nginx, very light weight and fast. It does has some configuration unfortunately, so it might not be ideal for you, but worth checking out.
http://gunicorn.org
http://wiki.nginx.org/
Here is a blog post that explains how to set it up with supervisord.
http://kencochrane.net/blog/2011/06/django-gunicorn-nginx-supervisord-fabric-centos55/