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Deployment Notes for Pylons, Nginx, and uWSGI

I recently decided to switch from lighttpd to nginx. I have one particularly critical Pylons app currently deployed with paster, and after reading I decided on for this application.

Getting nginx setup was no problem - just be sure to configure with the uWSGI module:

$ ./configure --add-module=../uwsgi/nginx/

Then follow the normal .

Things got a bit murky for me after this point, as there seems to be a lack of step-by-step information for getting a a Pylons app actually served up using uWSGI+Nginx. Here are the exact steps to follow that finally worked for me.

1. Install virtualenv and create a virtualevn for your Pylons app:

$ easy_install virtualenv
$ mkdir ~/virtualenv
$ cd ~/virtualevn
$ virtualenv --distribute myapp

2. Install any python libraries needed by your Pylons app:

$ cd ~/virtualenv/myapp/bin
$ ./easy_install Pylons, SQLAlchemy, MySQL-python, \
   PasteDeploy, Mako, formencode, webhelpers, python-memcached

3. Generate an .egg for your Pylons app - change to the root directory of your Pylons app and run these commands:

$ rm -rf *.egg-info (where * is the name of your pylons app)
$ rm -rf dist
$ rm -rf buid

Now open the MANIFEST.in file, and edit it so that all these directories will be recursively include: i18n, model, controllers, forms, config, lib, public. Then run the following:

$ python setup.py egg_info
$ python setup.py bdist_egg

You should now be able to cd to dist/ and see the .egg file. Make a note of the path as you will need it next.

4. Install the Pylons app .egg in your virtualenv:

$ cd ~/virtualenv/myapp/bin
$ ./easy_install /path_to_the_egg/the.egg

You should now be able to cd to ~/virtualenv/myapp/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages/ and see your egg as well as all the other libraries you installed in step 2.

5. Setup the server in your Nginx config file:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name www.yoursite.com yoursite.com;
  charset utf-8;
  root /path_to_your_pylons_app/public;
  index index.html index.htm;
  location ~*/(img|js|iepng|css)/ {
    root /path_to_your_pylons_app/public;
    expires     max;
    add_header Cache-Control "public";
    break;
  }
  location / {
    uwsgi_pass 0.0.0.0:3031;
    include     uwsgi_params;
    uwsgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /;
  }
}

6. Create your pylons production.ini file and start uWSGI with the path to your virtualenv as the python home dir:

$ uwsgi --paste config:/production.ini --socket :3031 -H ~/virtualenv/myapp

That is all, I hope it saves you some headache.

Deployment Notes for Pylons, Nginx, and uWSGI

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