how to nginx virtual servers + fcgi for django? - django

Question

I would like to run several virtual hosts via nginx, each serving a different django app via fcgi. Is this possible? If so, does anyone have good resources on where/how to start? The nginx docs seem to be mostly examples, but none of the particular config I'm attempting...

Answer 1

There have been two pretty good blog posts lately about setting up nginx, but both are using nginx to serve static (or cached) content and apache + mod_wsgi to serve Django. I prefer this myself because mod_wsgi makes process management so much easier than fcgi (among other advantages).
Anyway, here are the posts:
The Django and Ubuntu Intrepid Almanac
django, nginx, memcached - the dynamic trio
EDIT: ok I dug out an old tar file with my nginx + django + virtual host config files from a year ago before I switched to apache + mod_wsgi. This was a development machine, so you'll want to adjust # of workers, connections, etc.
nginx.conf:
user nginx nginx;
worker_processes 2;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error_log info;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
use epoll;
}
http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
log_format main
'$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] '
'"$request" $status $bytes_sent '
'"$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" '
'"$gzip_ratio"';
client_header_timeout 3m;
client_body_timeout 3m;
send_timeout 3m;
connection_pool_size 256;
client_header_buffer_size 1k;
large_client_header_buffers 4 2k;
request_pool_size 4k;
gzip on;
gzip_min_length 1100;
gzip_buffers 4 32k;
gzip_types text/plain text/html application/x-javascript text/xml text/css;
output_buffers 4 32k;
postpone_output 1460;
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;
keepalive_timeout 75 20;
ignore_invalid_headers on;
include vhosts.d/*.conf;
}
So, the main nginx.conf includes every file in the vhosts.d/ subdirectory. One of my files was for serving PHP on localhost (was probably running phpMyAdmin) like this:
vhosts.d/00_localhost:
server {
listen 127.0.0.1:80;
server_name localhost;
access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access_log main;
error_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.error_log info;
root /var/www/localhost/htdocs;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
location ~ .php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8888;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/localhost/htdocs$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
}
}
And then a local Django development server like this:
50_django.local:
server {
listen 80;
server_name django.local;
access_log /var/log/nginx/django.access.log main;
error_log /var/log/nginx/django.error.log info;
root /var/www/django.local;
location ~* ^.+\.(mpg|avi|mp3|swf|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|rtf|mpeg)$ {
access_log off;
break;
}
location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|bmp|js)$ {
expires 30d;
break;
}
location / {
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/www/django.local/server.sock;
include fastcgi.conf;
}
location ^~ /admin/ {
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/www/django.local/server.sock;
include fastcgi.conf;
access_log off;
auth_basic "Welcome to admin";
}
}
Finally, each of the virtual servers included a fastcgi.conf for each location.
fastcgi.conf:
fastcgi_pass_header Authorization;
fastcgi_intercept_errors off;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol;
fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI $document_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $document_root;
fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_USER $remote_user;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT $remote_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE "nginx";
fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE "CGI/1.1";
fastcgi_param UID_SET $uid_set;
fastcgi_param UID_GOT $uid_got;
I'm not sure all of the above were required, but that was another one of the reasons I switched to mod_wsgi... superior support and documentation :)

Answer 2

Since this question was asked someone created a pip installable django package that will generate an apache or nginx vhost file for you from your settings.py
pip install django-vhost
Check it out here: https://bitbucket.org/djangostars/django-vhost