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 a 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/ 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 nginx passwd -d nginx }}} 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 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 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; fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $remote_addr; } 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 }}}