I want to have simple program in python that can process different requests (POST, GET, MULTIPART-FORMDATA). I don't want to use a complete framework.
I basically need to be able to get GET and POST params - probably (but not necessarily) in a way similar to PHP. To get some other SERVER variables like REQUEST_URI, QUERY, etc.
I have installed nginx successfully, but I've failed to find a good example on how to do the rest. So a simple tutorial or any directions and ideas on how to setup nginx to run certain python process for certain virtual host would be most welcome!
Although you can make Python run a webserver by itself with wsgiref, I would recommend using one of the many Python webservers and/or web frameworks around. For pure and simple Python webhosting we have several options available:
gunicorn
tornado
twisted
uwsgi
cherrypy
If you're looking for more features you can look at some web frameworks:
werkzeug
flask
masonite
cherrypy (yes, cherrypy is both a webserver and a framework)
django (for completeness, I know that was not the purpose of the question)
You should look into using Flask -- it's an extremely lightweight interface to a WSGI server (werkzeug) which also includes a templating library, should you ever want to use one. But you can totally ignore it if you'd like.
You can use thttpd. It is a lightweight wsgi server for running cgi scripts. It works well with nginx. How to setup thttpd with Nginx is detailed here: http://nginxlibrary.com/running-cgi-scripts-using-thttpd/
All the same you must use wsgi server, as nginx does not support fully this protocol.
We are deploying django application, I found in the documentation that it is recommended to use WSGI appoach for doing that.
Before deploying I wanted to know, why it is recommended over other two approaches i.e. using mod_python and fastcgi...
Thanks a lot.
wsgi is usually preferred because it decouples your choice of framework from your choice of web server: if tomorrow you want to move, say, from Apache to nginx, or whatever, the move is trivially easy with wsgi, not so easy otherwise.
Furthermore, using wsgi affords you the option to add some middleware that's framework-independent, rather than having to rely on every possible functionality you want having already been implemented and made available for your framework of choice.
We tried mod_python. It's slower and harder to configure. It doesn't offer the daemon feature.
We couldn't get fast_cgi built for our combination of Apache, Red Hat and Python. I'm not sure specifically what was wrong, but we couldn't get it built properly. It wouldn't dispatch requests to Django properly, and we couldn't diagnose the problem.
We tried mod_wsgi third. It built nicely. It has the daemon option. It's very easy to configure. It allows trivial restart of the Django applications without restarting all of Apache.
I use mod_wsgi for any production Django app. It's fast, stable, and very configurable.
You may also want to look in to the FastCGI method a bit more. Eric Florenzano just did a great write up of Django with FastCGI for the Django Advent: http://djangoadvent.com/1.2/deploying-django-site-using-fastcgi/
Or should I be using a totally different server?
Nginx with mod_wsgi requires the use of a non-blocking asynchronous framework and setup and isn't likely to work out of box with Pylons.
I usually go with the proxy route to a stand-alone Pylons process using the PasteScript#cherrypy WSGI server (as its higher performing than the Paste#http one, though it won't recycle threads if you have leaks...).
If you're set on using Apache and its your server (so you can compile and run Apache mod_wsgi), I'd suggest using that setup as its less maintenance to effectively utilize multiple cores. With a proxy setup, you'd have to use the mod_proxy_balancer with multiple paste processes to effectively utilize multiple cores/cpus.
If you're deploying to someone else's Apache (shared hosting), mod_proxy is generally the easier solution as its stock in Apache 2.2 and above.
Personally, I usually deploy with nginx + proxy to multiple paster processes.
I've also used mod_fastcgi + flup to great success several times now. There are a couple of recipes floating around for setting this up, but unfortunately it will probably still require some tweaking on your part to get everything working:
http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscookbook/Production+Deployment+Using+Apache,+FastCGI+and+mod_rewrite
I'd like to serve django application on windows XP/Vista.
The application is an at hoc web interface to a windows program so it won't be put under heavy load (around 100 requests per second).
Do you know any small servers that can be easily deployed on windows to serve a django app? (IIS is not an option as the app should work on all versions of windows)
cherrypy includes a good server. Here's how you set it up to work with django and some benchmarks.
twisted.web has wsgi support and that could be used to run your django application. Here's how you do it.
In fact any wsgi server will do. Here's one more example, this time using spawning:
$ spawn --factory=spawning.django_factory.config_factory mysite.settings
And for using paste, the info is gathered here.
Of course, you could use apache with mod_wsgi. It would be just another wsgi server. Here are the setup instructions.
If you want to give Apache a go, check out XAMPP to see if it'll work for you. You can do a lightweight (read: no installation) "installation." Of course, you'll also want to install mod_python to run Django. This post may help you set everything up. (Note: I have not used python/Django with XAMPP myself.)
Edit: Before someone points this out, XAMPP is not generally a production-ready tool. It's simply a useful way to see whether Apache will work for you. Also, I saw that you're using SQLite after the fact.
Why not Apache ?
Nokia have developed a scaled down version of apache to run on their mobile phones. It supports python.
http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/mobile-web-server/
Also do you need anything else such as database support etc?
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I'm about to deploy a mediumsized site powered by Django. I have a dedicated Ubuntu Server.
I'm really confused over which serversoftware to use. So i thought to myself: why not ask stackoverflow.
What i'm looking for is:
Easy to set up
Fast and easy on resources
Can serve mediafiles
Able to serve multiple djangosites on same server
I would rather not install PHP or anything else that sucks resources, and for which I have no use for.
I have heard of mod_wsgi and mod_python on Apache, nginx and lighty. Which are the pros and cons of these and have i missed someone?
#Barry: Somehow i feel like Apache is to bloated for me. What about the alternatives?
#BrianLy: Ok I'll check out mod_wsgi some more. But why do i need Apache if i serve static files with lighty? I have also managed to serve the django app itself with lighty. Is that bad in anyway? Sorry for beeing so stupid :-)
UPDATE: What about lighty and nginx - which are the uses-cases when these are the perfect choice?
Since I was looking for some more in-depth answers, I decided to research the issue myself in depth. Please let me know if I've misunderstood anything.
Some general recommendation are to use a separate webserver for handling media. By separate, I mean a webserver which is not running Django. This server can be for instance:
Lighttpd (Lighty)
Nginx (EngineX)
Or some other light-weight server
Then, for Django, you can go down different paths. You can either:
Serve Django via Apache and:
mod_python
This is the stable and recommended/well documented way. Cons: uses a lot of memory.
mod_wsgi
From what I understand, mod_wsgi is a newer alternative. It appears to be faster and easier on resources.
mod_fastcgi
When using FastCGI you are delegating the serving of Django to another process. Since mod_python includes a python interpreter in every request it uses a lot of memory. This is a way to bypass that problem. Also there is some security concerns.
What you do is that you start your Django FastCGI server in a separate process and then configures apache via rewrites to call this process when needed.
Or you can:
Serve Django without using Apache but with another server that supports FastCGI natively:
(The documentation mentions that you can do this if you don't have any Apache specific needs. I guess the reason must be to save memory.)
Lighttpd
This is the server that runs Youtube. It seems fast and easy to use, however i've seen reports on memoryleaks.
nginx
I've seen benchmarks claiming that this server is even faster than lighttpd. It's mostly documented in Russian though.
Another thing, due to limitations in Python your server should be running in forked mode, not threaded.
So this is my current research, but I want more opinions and experiences.
I'm using Cherokee.
According to their benchmarks (grain of salt with them), it handles load better than both Lighttpd and nginx... But that's not why I use it.
I use it because if you type cherokee-admin, it starts a new server that you can log into (with a one-time password) and configure the whole server through a beautifully-done webmin. That's a killer feature. It has already saved me a lot of time. And it's saving my server a lot of resources!
As for django, I'm running it as a threaded SCGI process. Works well. Cherokee can keep it running too. Again, very nice feature.
The current Ubuntu repo version is very old so I'd advise you use their PPA. Good luck.
As #Barry said, the documentation uses mod_python. I haven't used Ubuntu as a server, but had a good experience with mod_wsgi on Solaris. You can find documentation for mod_wsgi and Django on the mod_wsgi site.
A quick review of your requirements:
Easy to setup I've found apache 2.2 fairly easy to build and install.
Fast and easy on resources I would say that this depends on your usage and traffic. * You may not want to server all files using Apache and use LightTPD (lighty) to server static files.
Can serve media files I assume you mean images, flash files? Apache can do this.
Multiple sites on same server Virtual server hosting on Apache.
Rather not install other extensions Comment out anything you don't want in the Apache config.
The officially recommended way to deploy a django project is to use mod_python with apache. This is described in the documentation. The main pro with this is that it is the best documented, most supported, and most common way to deploy. The con is that it probably isn't the fastest.
The best configuration is not so known I think. But here is:
Use nginx for serving requests (dynamic to app, static content directly).
Use python web server for serving dynamic content.
Two most speedy solutions for python-based web server is:
cogen
fapws2
You need to look into google to find current best configuration for django (still in development).
I’m using nginx (0.6.32 taken from Sid) with mod_wsgi. It works very well, though I can’t say whether it’s better than the alternatives because I never tried any. Nginx has memcached support built in, which can perhaps interoperate with the Django caching middleware (I don’t actually use it, instead I fill the cache manually using python-memcache and invalidate it when changes are made), so cache hits completely bypass Django (my development machine can serve about 3000 requests per second).
A caveat: nginx’ mod_wsgi highly dislikes named locations (it tries to pass them in SCRIPT_NAME), so the obvious ‘error_page 404 = #django’ will cause numerous obscure errors. I had to patch mod_wsgi source to fix that.
I'm struggling to understand all the options as well. In this blog post I found some benefits of mod_wsgi compared to mod_python explained.
Multiple low-traffic sites on a small VPS make RAM consumption the primary concern, and mod_python seems like a bad option there. Using lighttpd and FastCGI, I've managed to get the minimum memory usage of a simple Django site down to 58MiB virtual and 6.5MiB resident (after restarting and serving a single non-RAM-heavy request).
I've noticed that upgrading from Python 2.4 to 2.5 on Debian Etch increased the minimum memory footprint of the Python processes by a few percent. On the other hand, 2.5's better memory management might have a bigger opposite effect on long-running processes.
Keep it simple: Django recommends Apache and mod_wsgi (or mod_python). If serving media files is a very big part of your service, consider Amazon S3 or Rackspace CloudFiles.
There are many ways, approach to do this.For that reason, I recommend to read carefully the article related to the deployment process on DjangoAdvent.com:
Eric Florenzano - Deploying Django with FastCGI: http://djangoadvent.com/1.2/deploying-django-site-using-fastcgi/
Read too:
Mike Malone - Scaling Django
Stochastictechnologies Blog: The perfect Django Setup
Mikkel Hoegh Blog: 35 % Response-time-improvement-switching-uwsgi-nginx
Regards
In my opinion best/fastest stack is varnish-nginx-uwsgi-django.
And I'm successfully using it.
If you're using lighthttpd, you can also use FastCGI for serving Django. I'm not sure how the speed compares to mod_wsgi, but if memory serves correctly, you get a couple of the benefits that you would get with mod_wsgi that you wouldn't get with mod_python. The main one being that you can give each application its own process (which is really helpful for keeping memory of different apps separated as well as for taking advantage of multi-core computers.
Edit: Just to add in regards to your update about nginix, if memory serves correctly again, nginix uses "greenlets" to handle concurrency. This means that you may need to be a little bit more careful to make sure that one app doesn't eat up all the server's time.
We use nginx and FastCGI for all of our Django deployments. This is mostly because we usually deploy over at Slicehost, and don't want to donate all of our memory to Apache. I guess this would be our "use case".
As for the remarks about the documentation being mostly in Russian -- I've found most of the information on the English wiki to be very useful and accurate. This site has sample configurations for Django too, from which you can tweak your own nginx configuration.
I have a warning for using Cherokee. When you make changes to Django Cherokee maintains the OLD process, instead of killing it and starting a new one.
On Apache i strongly recommend this article.
http://www.djangofoo.com/17/django-mod_wsgi-deploy-exampl
Its easy to setup, easy to kill or reset after making changes.
Just type in terminal
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
and changes are seen instantly.