Question

I would like to run several virtual hosts via nginx, each serving a different django app via fcgi. Is this possible? If so, does anyone have good resources on where/how to start? The nginx docs seem to be mostly examples, but none of the particular config I’m attempting…

Answer 1

There have been two pretty good blog posts lately about setting up nginx, but both are using nginx to serve static (or cached) content and apache + mod_wsgi to serve Django. I prefer this myself because mod_wsgi makes process management so much easier than fcgi (among other advantages).

Anyway, here are the posts:

• The Django and Ubuntu Intrepid Almanac
• django, nginx, memcached – the dynamic trio

EDIT: ok I dug out an old tar file with my nginx + django + virtual host config files from a year ago before I switched to apache + mod_wsgi. This was a development machine, so you’ll want to adjust # of workers, connections, etc.

nginx.conf:

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   3m; client_body_timeout     3m; send_timeout            3m;  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 32k; gzip_types      text/plain text/html application/x-javascript text/xml text/css;  output_buffers  4 32k; postpone_output 1460;  sendfile        on; tcp_nopush      on; tcp_nodelay     on;  keepalive_timeout       75 20;  ignore_invalid_headers  on;  include vhosts.d/*.conf; } 

So, the main nginx.conf includes every file in the vhosts.d/ subdirectory. One of my files was for serving PHP on localhost (was probably running phpMyAdmin) like this:

vhosts.d/00_localhost:

server {    listen 127.0.0.1:80;   server_name localhost;    access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access_log main;   error_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.error_log info;    root /var/www/localhost/htdocs;   index index.php index.html index.htm;      location ~ .php$ {         fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:8888;         fastcgi_index  index.php;         fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www/localhost/htdocs$fastcgi_script_name;         fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING     $query_string;         fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD   $request_method;         fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE     $content_type;         fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH   $content_length;   } } 

And then a local Django development server like this:

50_django.local:

server {    listen  80;   server_name django.local;    access_log /var/log/nginx/django.access.log main;   error_log /var/log/nginx/django.error.log info;    root /var/www/django.local;    location ~* ^.+\.(mpg|avi|mp3|swf|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|rtf|mpeg)$ {     access_log off;     break;   }    location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|bmp|js)$ {     expires 30d;     break;   }    location / {     fastcgi_pass unix:/var/www/django.local/server.sock;     include fastcgi.conf;   }    location ^~ /admin/ {     fastcgi_pass unix:/var/www/django.local/server.sock;     include fastcgi.conf;     access_log off;     auth_basic 'Welcome to admin';   } } 

Finally, each of the virtual servers included a fastcgi.conf for each location.

fastcgi.conf:

fastcgi_pass_header Authorization; fastcgi_intercept_errors off;  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_param SERVER_PORT       $server_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL   $server_protocol; fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME       $server_name;  fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI       $request_uri; fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI      $document_uri; fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT     $document_root; fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR       $server_addr; fastcgi_param REMOTE_USER       $remote_user; fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR       $remote_addr; fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT       $remote_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE   'nginx'; fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE 'CGI/1.1';  fastcgi_param UID_SET           $uid_set; fastcgi_param UID_GOT           $uid_got; 

I’m not sure all of the above were required, but that was another one of the reasons I switched to mod_wsgi… superior support and documentation 🙂