Deploy Django REST APIs on Ubuntu Server with uWSGI

We will setup the Django package for REST APIs; install required system packages on Ubuntu server; setup supervisor, a popular tool for ensuring our service is running and logging; and NGINX configuration. If you want to setup certificates then you may additionally use Lets Encrypt's certbot.

What does this article not include?

It does not include instructions for setting up the static directory for Django application. If this applies to you, then you may still follow this whereas applicable to your deployment.

Ubuntu Packages

In this article we are using Ubuntu but these packages are available to almost any Linux based distribution.

sudo apt update &&
sudo apt install -y build-essential python3 python3-pip \
python3-dev python3-venv supervisor nginx &&
python3 -m pip install uwsgi &&
sudo mkdir /app &&
sudo mkdir /app/django

I like to use app directory at root of file system, you may choose a location which fits you the best.

Django Setup

1. Save your Django project in /app/django/ directory and cd into it. Create you virtual environment to install your Python packages. Here is a quick-how.

python3 -m venv venv &&
source ./venv/bin/activate &&
python3 -m pip install -r [requirements.txt]

2. Admin Portal: If you are using Django's built-in admin portal, you might want to import CSS and other static files which it uses to render itself. You can do so by creating a symlink to it under /app/django/[appname].

ln -s venv/lib/python[YOUR-INSTALLATION-VERISON]/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/static/admin/ admin

3. We also need to ensure that correct permissions are setup so NGINX can access our project files. We can do so by making www-data owner of /app directory used by NGINX. You can add yourself to the group with the second command.

chown -R www-data:www-data /app &&
usermod -a -G www-data $USER

4. For next steps, note down the paths to your django project and virtual environment.

/app/django/[appname]
/app/django/[appname]/venv
/app/django/[appname]/admin

You may additionally want to edit your settings.py file to set DEBUG to False or make CORS and CSRF changes.

uWSGI Setup

Within /app/django/[appname] directory, make file uwsgi-[appname].ini. Here is what it has to include.

[uwsgi]
chdir=/app/django/[appname]
module=[appname-or-core-package-name].wsgi:application
# Settings module
env='DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=[appname-or-core-package-name].settings'
# Python vitual env
home=/app/django/[appname]/venv
master=True
pidfile=/tmp/django-[appname].pid
socket=127.0.0.1:8001
processes=5
vacuum=True
max-requests=5000

You may need to includes configuration for plugins (plugins=python3[x], plugins-dir=/usr/lib/uwsgi/plugins) if you installed uwsgi as a system package and not Python's pip. I recommend to use Python package and the same is recommended by Django's documentation.

Supervisor Setup

As per official website, Supervisor is a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems. This is useful to us as it can control our uWSGI process and ensure our Django application stays up and running.

Now lets navigate to it's config directory.

cd /etc/supervisor/conf.d/

Here make a file supervisor.conf to store our configuration. Supervisor will use this config to spawn or restart our server instances.

[program:uwsgi]
command=uwsgi --ini /app/django/[appname]/uswgi-[appname].ini
autostart=true
autorestart=true
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/var/log/supervisor/uwsgi-[appname].log

And then restart the supervisor service.

sudo systemctl restart supervisor

To ensure that uWSGI process is spawned properly, you can check the log file we indicated in the config or check active ports on machine with lsof.

sudo tail -F /var/log/supervisor/uwsgi-[appname].log

sudo lsof -i :8001

Now there are some possibilities. Few commons one are:

1. uWSGI processes spawned as expected. Hurray!
2. uWSGI cannot be found. In that case use path /home/[user-name]/.local/bin/uwsgi for command and restart supervisor service.

NGINX Setup

To listen to our uWSGI process, you need to setup NGINX. Starts by making the configuration file with your favorite text editor.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/[domain-com]

A basic configuration that will work for us looks like this.

server {
  listen 80;
  index index.html index.htm;

  server_name localhost;

  # For Django Admin static files
  location /static/admin/ {
        alias /app/django/appname/admin/;
    }

  location / {
    include uwsgi_params;
    uwsgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8001;
  }
}

You can change localhost to your domain name here. After this restart NGINX and you should be able to open http://localhost in browser.

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service

Install SSL Certificate

Although, we are done with what we set out to achieve at start of this article, we can go one step further and install SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt.

Follow installation instructions for Certbot: https://certbot.eff.org/

Make sure that you have firewall rule enabled to tcp/80 and tcp/443 if you cannot reach to your server from internet.

To install a certificate, run this command and follow the instructions in terminal.

sudo certbot --nginx