Rapidly deploy your django project behind gunicorn and nginx
Project description
Anouman is a django site deployment tool that is designed to greatly simplify the process of deploying Django projects behind gunicorn/nginx. In the spirit of reusing great open source software Anouman makes use of virtualenv,virtualenvwrapper, and of course django to help manage the process of deploying your django instances.
The easiest way to become familiar with Anouman is to dive in and use it by following along with the tutorial below. However, before you begin you will first need to install vagrant and virtualbox. You will be using these tools to build a fresh Ubuntu VM to test your django deployment on.
Disclaimer: Anouman is still very much alpha stage software. As such it has only been tested on Ubuntu 12.04 using the BASH shell. I’d love to hear from others if they get this working in other OS/SHELL combinations.
Install Anouman
pip install anouman
Virtual Machine Creation and Provisioning
Step 1: VM Creation
anouman --vm test1
This command uses vagrant to create and spin up a virtual machine in a directory called test1. As part of the process it created a user anouman with sudo privileges and password anouman. To login use:
ssh anouman@192.168.100.100 # Password *anouman*
Step 2: Final provisioning
If you are using MySQL or Postgres you will need to install them now. For mysql
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
You will then need to login to the mysql server and create the appropriate database for your django project.
If you are using Postgres you will need to follow a similar protocal to setup your Postgres database.
Assuming this worked then you are ready to walk through the anouman tutorial and deploy your django project on a fresh virtual machine.
Anouman Setup and Deployment Tutorial
Section 1: Packaging
This section will assume you have a django project called example. Most likely your project is not named example so to follow along with your project simple replace example with your project’s name.
Before you begin make sure to open a new Terminal window.
Step 1: Switch to the python virtualenv you use for development. You are using virtualenv for python development right? If not Anouman should still work with your python system packages.
source /path/to/your/virtualenv/activate pip install anouman
Step 2: Update your django settings file to reflect the Virtual Machine you are about to deploy it on.
If you are using sqlite as your backend database you can ignore this section.
If you are using MySQL or Postgres with your project you will likely need to update your DATABASE settings in your settings.py file. Look for the DATABASE Section and update change the HOST line to:
'HOST': '192.168.100.100'
STATIC_ROOT and MEDIA_ROOT will be automatically set during deployment to reflect a default installion. Don’t worry your original settings.py file on your local machine will remain untouched.
Step 3: Next you will create an anouman package that will be deployable on an anouman loaded server. Start by navigating to the directory containing your django project. This is the directory you originally ran django-admin.py startproject from. For instance if you ran django-admin startprojet example from your home directory then you want to be in your home directory when you issue the folowing command:
anouman --django-project=example --domainname=example.com
Behind the scenes your django project was copied into a directory named example.com/src. Inside this directory is another file which contains a listing of python packages you are using for your django projects. This was determiend from the output of “pip freeze”
Section2: Deploying
Step 4: Scp your project to the virtual machine we created above and then log in.
scp example.com.tar.gz anouman@192.168.100.100:/home/anouman
Return to the terminal where you are logged into your vm or relogin with:
ssh anouman@192.168.100.100
Step 5: Install anouman into the servers system python repository.
sudo pip install anouman
Step 6: Setup anouman and deploy your new project. The first time you run anouman, with or without arguments, it will install itself and in the process create a wrapped ‘anouman‘ virtualenv as well as a wrapped ‘example.com‘ virtualenv. For the sake of this tutorial we will do both setup and deployment with one command.
anouman --deploy example.com.tar.gz
Follow the intructions when this command finished to update you .bash_profile
Step 8: Assuming you update and sourced .bash_profile at the end of the deployment step you will now have a few shell commands that were appended to the end of your sites virtualenv activate script. For instance to check the status of gunicorn/nginx type:
site status
Now let’s bring it up..
site start
Likewise you can stop your site with:
site stop
Go ahead and bring the site back up:
site start
You can force nginx to do a reload with:
site reload
These site management commands are specific to the site curently being worked on. If you install another django project anouman will gladly set it up for you and ensure that nginx properly directs traffic to the appropriate django back end and it’s all managed with virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper. To switch between sites deployed with anouman is as simple as switching wrapped virtualenv’s. For ex: workon example.com, workon site2.com, etc.
Step 9: Adjust client /etc/hosts file to simulate DNS for your web site. First make sure your site is running (see step 8). Next, add the following line to your /etc/hosts
192.168.100.100 www.example.com example.com
Step 10: Now point your browser to example.com and you should see your django website. Enjoy.
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