I just recently grabbed a hosting setup on VPSLink.com and wanted to get Django up and running. I'd heard good things about nginx, but had never set it up or configured it before, so I figured I'd give it a try. There were a few little bumps I ran into, but in the end the setup worked pretty well so I wanted to share my setup and configuration experience with everyone here.

This setup is running Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 as xen instance on VPSLink, this walks through starting everything up from scratch, but assumes you are running as root (type su to switch to the root user)

The first thing I had to do was install python:

aptitude install python

Next, I needed Django, which I got the latest SVN release (due to a ManyToMany bug I saw in the past, I'm sticking to a release I didn't have trouble with):

aptitude install subversion
cd /
mkdir django
cd django
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ -r 7210
cd trunk
python setup.py install

Next, to run Django through fastcgi, we need python-flup:

aptitude install python-flup

Let's start a sample project just to make things easy: (Note: for some reason, the PYTHONPATH and PATH variables, although they included the django bin directory, still couldn't find django-admin.py, so I included the full path)

cd /
mkdir projects
cd projects/
python /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/bin/django-admin.py startproject sample_project

Also, create a media directory:

cd /
mkdir media

Let's start up the fastcgi setup: (Note: I didn't need any extra stuff on my pythonpath, but if you do, just add --pythonpath=/path/to/add) (Note: Nothing should print here)

cd /projects/sample_project/
python manage.py runfcgi host=127.0.0.1 port=8080 --settings=settings

Now let's setup Nginx:

First, create a user for nginx to run as, and then remove a password from it so no one can log in as the user:

useradd apache
passwd -d apache

Let's install nginx from aptitude:

aptitude install nginx

Next, we need to change the configuration (and back up the default one just in case):

cd /etc/nginx/
mv nginx.conf nginx-backup.conf
touch nginx.conf

Now we need to put some new stuff into the default nginx configuration, here is the template I used:

user  apache apache;

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	10m;
	client_body_timeout	10m;
	send_timeout		10m;

	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 8k;
	gzip_types	text/plain;

	output_buffers	1 32k;
	postpone_output	1460;

	sendfile	on;
	tcp_nopush	on;
	tcp_nodelay	on;

	keepalive_timeout	75 20;

	ignore_invalid_headers	on;
	index index.html;

	server {
		listen 80;
		server_name localhost;
		location /site_media  {
			root /media/; # Notice this is the /media folder that we create above
		}
		location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js|mov) {
			access_log   off;
			expires      30d; 
		}
		location / {
			# host and port to fastcgi server
			fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8080;
			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_pass_header Authorization;
			fastcgi_intercept_errors off;
			}
		access_log	/var/log/nginx/localhost.access_log main;
		error_log	/var/log/nginx/localhost.error_log;
	}
}

Now all we need to do is start up nginx:

/etc/init.d/nginx start