Deployment

In short:

• Create a local_settings.py alongside settings.py for your host-specific settings (like database connection, email, etc).
• Configure your WSGI or FastCGI server.

All projects come with the deployment files to properly run your Pinax project in a production environment. These are located in the deploy/ directory of your project.

Using mod_wsgi

Here is a basic configuration for Apache (assuming you are using Python 2.7):

WSGIDaemonProcess mysite python-path=/path/to/mysite-env/lib/python2.7/site-packages
WSGIProcessGroup mysite

WSGIScriptAlias / /path/to/project/wsgi.py
<Directory /path/to/project>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Directory>

The above configuration will likely need to be modified before use. Most specifically make sure the python-path option points to the right Python version. We encourage you to read about WSGIDaemonProcess to learn more about what you can configure.

Using gunicorn

Install gunicorn in your environment (best to add it to your requirements file) and run gunicorn:

(mysite-env)$ pip install gunicorn
(mysite-env)$ gunicorn --workers=2 --bind=127.0.0.1:8000 wsgi:application

This assumes your current working directory is your project root (wsgi must be importable from where you are). Running the example shown above as-is will not be sufficient for a production website. You will need to daemonize the gunicorn processes and supervise them. Please refer to gunicorn documentation for more information.

Using FastCGI

To use FastCGI (including SCGI or AJP) you must install flup. This can be done by using pip:

pip install flup

Once installed, you can use Django’s built-in runfcgi management command to run a server. For example:

python manage.py method=threaded host=127.0.0.1 port=3033

You can learn much more about runfcgi from the Django documentation on FastCGI deployment.

Media files

During development media files were handled for you. Running a production Pinax project it is strongly recommeneded you do not rely on SERVE_MEDIA = True. By default, SERVE_MEDIA is set to DEBUG which likely means moving to production will turn off SERVE_MEDIA.

Pinax, by default, sets STATIC_ROOT and MEDIA_ROOT to directories within the same directory (site_media). This is very beneficial to running a production Pinax site as you can configure your web server to serve files from a single directory.

To collect all your static files into STATIC_ROOT for your web server to serve run:

(mysite-env)$ python manage.py collectstatic

nginx

server {
    ...

    location /site_media {
        alias /path/to/site_media;
    }
}

Apache

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ...

    Alias /site_media/ /path/to/site_media/

</VirtualHost>