serving up python with the quickness

April 05, 2010

python django nginx web development uwsgi

Inspired by Justin Lilly, I spent some time looking at various ways of running python web applications with an eye to performance. Nicholas Piël has done some great work testing and documenting many of them. Gevent looks like a great option as does CherryPy, but uWSGI caught my eye because it provides an nginx module and I’m already running lots of nginx. Since its fairly new, my stock nginx from the Ubuntu Karmic repository doesn’t come with uWSGI, but compiling it in is trivial.

So I’ve added uwsgi and nginx + uwsgi to my launchpad ppa for anyone out there who’d like to give it a spin on Karmic. My initial impressions are very positive. If you want to try it out, you can add my ppa to your apt sources and simply run:

sudo apt-get install nginx uwsgi

stevecrozz' custom nginx binary for ubuntu 0.7.59

June 09, 2009

ubuntu web server nginx

The nginx build in the official ubuntu package repository is somewhat out-of-date, so I built my own package from source using 0.7.59. I’m going to provide it here in case anyone else would like it. One of the new features I like is the try_files directive. Here’s an example of what I’m doing using 0.6.35, the full post is here http://lithostech.com/lighten-apaches-load-nginx:

location / {
  root /var/www/fresnobeehive.com;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For  $remote_addr;
  if (-f $document_root/beehive$uri) {
    rewrite (.*) /beehive$1 break;
  }
  if (-f $request_filename) {
    break;
  }
  if (-f $request_filename/index.html) {
    rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break;
  }
  if (-f $document_root/beehive$uri/index.html) {
    rewrite (.*) /beehive$1/index.html break;
  }
  if (!-f $request_filename) {
    proxy_pass http://fresnobeehive.com:8080;
    break;
  }
}

lighten apache's load with nginx

May 28, 2009

web server nginx

Since we’ve been on slicehost, I’ve been forced to play the role of system administrator since we don’t have a real one. One problem I’ve run into is the long string of legacy applications that I have to support. Some of them I wrote, and some of them I inherited. For many reasons, they’re often organized and run in sub-optimal ways. Separating your static and dynamic content is a good habit to get into when you’re building scalable web applications. Static content is highly portable because it can live without context. You can serve it from anywhere and nobody knows the difference. When your site starts to get huge traffic, you can easily offload your static content to a CDN if you host it in an easy-to-separate way using an URL like static.domain.com or domain.com/static.