Efficient Production Deployment of Django with Nginx and Gunicorn

This post intends to help you in quick setup along with configuration files and their contents. In subsequent post I shall include ssl setup as well.

We shall follow step-by-step approach to to deploy a Django application over AWS using nginx and gunicorn.

Software version details in this blog:
Django : 3.2
Python: 3.10

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STEP 1 : Create a Django project

For now we shall assume that you have a basic Django project setup that you run locally using the command below.

python manage.py runserver

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STEP 2 : Connecting gunicorn to Django app

Install gunicorn in your virtual environment.

pip install django gunicorn

Configuring gunicorn. The below command should give you an indication whether the gunicorn is running correctly.

gunicorn --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 <your_project_name>.wsgi

Now deactivate your virtual env.

Daemonizing gunicorn using systemd (highly recommended).

a) Create gunicorn socket file.

sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/gunicorn.socket

# file content of gunicorn.socket
[Unit]
Description=gunicorn socket
[Socket]
ListenStream=/run/gunicorn.sock
[Install]
WantedBy=sockets.target

b) Create gunicorn service file

sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/gunicorn.service

# file content of gunicorn.service
[Unit]
Description=gunicorn daemon
Requires=gunicorn.socket
After=network.target

[Service]
# here you should put the user who has access to the django project path (In my case it was ubuntu)
User=ubuntu
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=<path to your django project root>
ExecStart=<path to your django virtual env>/bin/gunicorn \
          --access-logfile - \
          --workers 3 \
          --bind unix:/run/gunicorn.sock \
          core.wsgi:application
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

c) Start and enable socket

sudo systemctl start gunicorn.socket

sudo systemctl enable gunicorn.socket

d) [optional] In case you update the gunicorn service file later, run the below commands

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl restart gunicorn.service

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STEP 3: Configuring Nginx as a reverse proxy

Create a configuration file for Nginx using the following command

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/<your_project_name>.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name xyz.domain.in;
    charset utf-8;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

    location /static/ {
        alias <your_project_path>/staticfiles/;
    }
    location /media/ {
        alias <your_project_path>/media/;
    }
    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/run/gunicorn.sock;
    }
    location /favicon.ico {
        access_log off;
        log_not_found off;
    }
    location /robots.txt {
        access_log off;
        log_not_found off;
    }
}

What we shall do below is create a symlink of the conf file in directory sites-enabled and start ngnix.

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/<your_project_name>.conf

sudo systemctl restart nginx