Important

This app has been discontinued and is no longer maintained.

Ansible Playbook for Django on Webfaction

DO NOT USE THIS! PLAYBOOK NOT EXECUTABLE! WORK IN PROGRESS!

Overview

This is an Ansible playbook that sets up a new Webfaction server for a Django project. You can, of course, just use the 1-click installer which is provided by Webfaction, but if you want to run your project professionally, you will outgrow that installer in no time.

Django will be served via nginx & uWSGI. This needs less memory than the Apache processes that Webfaction's 1-click installer would spawn and at the same time it's faster and allows more concurrent requests per second.

Static files will be handled by Webfaction's global nginx instance, as usual, mainly because I got used to it and it doesn't add memory usage to your account. The only downside here is that you cannot enable gzip compression for your static files. Webfaction disabled this on purpose because of security concerns. We could use our own nginx instance for this as well, and maybe we will in the future.

Additionally we will install statsd, carbon, whisper and graphite-api, which will enable you to create awesome dashboards to monitor any aspect of your app and your server.

In a different repository we will create a reusable Django app that works as a proxy before your graphite-api installation. This would enable you to add authentication and authorization in front of your graphite graphs to ensure that one user cannot see the graphs of another user (out of the box, graphite does not assume a multi-user setup). However, right now I'm not too sure if this app would be too project-specific. If we can find a way to create a genric one, it shall be a reusable Django app.

Supervisor will be used to keep all components up and running. A cronjob will restart Supervisor every 5 mintues, in case Webfaction killed the process or re-booted the server.

Installation in a nutshell

We assume that you have a Django project setup on your local machine. A good starting point to setup a new Django project is our django-project-template.

Using this playbook involves several steps:

• Setup your Webfaction apps and websites in the control panel
• Change the hosts variables of this playbook
• Upload your Django repo into a git repo and clone it on the server
• Create your local_settings.py
• Run the playbook

Prerequisites

Setup apps and websites

First, login to the Webfaction control panel and create the following applications:

• git - Git
• nginx - Custom app listening on port
• statsd - Custom app listening on port
• carbon - Custom app listening on port
• whisper - Custom app listening on port
• graphite - Custom app listening on port
• static - Static only (no .htaccess) / "expires max"
• media - Static only (no .htaccess) / "expires max"
• Delete the default htdocs app

You should also create a Postgres database and an email account. Usually graphite-web also needs a Postgres database, but since we are using, graphite-api, which is stateless, we don't need that second instance.

Change variables

Next, copy the hosts.example file and change the USERNAME to your Webfaction account name.

cp hosts.example hosts
vim hosts

Similarly, copy the vars/external_vars.yml file and change all values to your liking. The values you need to change are all uppercase letters.

cd vars
cp external_vars.yml.example external_vars.yml
vim external_vars.yml

Prepare the git repository

We assume that you have a Django project on your local machine. Naturally, you should have that project under version control. You might want to host your project on Bitbucket or Github, or you might just want to host the repository on the Webfaction server itself.

If you want to host it yourself, create a new repository on your server:

ssh [email protected]
cd webapps/git
git init --bare repos/project_name.git

On your local machine:

cd /path/to/your/django/repo/
git remote add origin [email protected]:/home/username/webapps/git/repos/project_name.git
git push -u origin master

Regardless of where you host it, you should now clone the repository on your server:

ssh [email protected]
mkdir -p ~/src
cd ~/src
git clone ~/webapps/git/repos/project_name.git
git submodule init
git submodule update

The snippet above assumes that you host the repo yourself. If you are hosting it somewhere else, of course the clone command will be different.

Once you have cloned the repository, create your local_settings.py. This file should be in .gitignore so having it lying around in this folder will be no problem but it will make the first deployment easier.

ssh [email protected]
cd ~/src/project_name/project_name/project_name/settings
cp local_settings.py.sample local_settings.py
vim local_settings.py

Usage

Now execute the playbook:

ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml

If you have correctly setup your Website in the webfaction panel, you should be able to see your Django project now if you visit http://username.webfactional.com.