Configure Django with Apache, MySQL and WSGi on Ubuntu

Installing required packages

All these packages that we're going to install are absolutely necessary for our project. Make sure to install them correctly. It would be better if our system is updated.

sudo apt -y update

sudo apt -y upgrade

Reboot after updating/upgrading system is considered a good idea. Install below listed packages

sudo apt -y install python3-pip apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3 mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev python3-dev

Creating new project directory

This is the initial phase of any Django project and also the cruicial one. A clean and easy-to-understand Directory structure is always considered as the best practice. Directory location does not matter much in case of Django. You can start project wherever you want. Just make sure you have appropriate permissions on that Directory.

Create a new directory on / and give it any name. I'll give it name django and then move inside that directory. I'll be running commands as root because the project directory is in / but you can make a directory anywhere, just make sure that the user must have rw permissions.

mkdir /django && cd /django

Now we can start our project here directly if we want to. But we will classify the project in a way that it'll be easy for us to distinguish between public files and private script files. We will create two directories with the name src and files.

mkdir src files

src directory is where we will define all our script files. This is private directory. files directory will contain our public content and log files. Don't worry, log files won't be served publicily. Move into /django/files and create these two directories names public and logs using the below command:

mkdir public logs

Now create directories two more sub-directories named static and media inside public directory.

cd public && mkdir static media

What we did here is we created a directory tree or structure inside our django project directory.

• src will contain our script files.
• logs will be used to save all log files of application.
• public will be used to serve any static content, which consists of CSS/JS files or image files such as logo & favicon.

This way, we can keep track of our project and classify it accordingly because now we know where certain file should be defined.

Creating Virtual environment and installing pip packages

To create virtual environment, we need to install virtualenv pip package and then activate that virtual environment. But first make sure our pip is upgraded to the latest version available. Move into project root directory, and use the below command:

cd /django

pip3 install --upgrade pip

pip3 install virtualenv

virtualenv venv -p python3

source venv/bin/activate

We created virtual environment named venv. Sometimes the system have more that one python version installed. Here we explicitly specify python3 in virtualenv venv -p pyhton3 to create virtual environment using python version 3.

In order to use the virtual environment, we need to activate it first. Last command source venv/bin/activate is used to activate the virtual environment.

pip install django mysqlclient

Along with django, we are also installing mysqlclient pip package, which will be used by django to connect to MySQL database.

Setting up new Django project and connecting it to MySQL

We will setup new Django project. For that, let's move inside /django/src directory and run the below command:

cd /django/src

django-admin startproject test_project .

We created new project named test_project. Pay attention to the . at the end of command. It means we want to create project directly inside current directory, which in this case is src. If we don't specify that . then django-admin command will create project in a saprate directory. So just to keep things simple, we don't want to add more unnecessary directories in the structure.

Now It's time to create MySQL database and connect it with our django project. Run below commands to create database and user. You can use sudo mysql if you are not root. We will assign some permissions on that database:

mysql

CREATE DATABASE test_db;

CREATE USER 'test_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON test_db.* TO 'test_user'@'localhost';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

After this process, we successfully created a MySQL database test_db, user test_user with password password, and granted appropriate permissions to the user over that database.

We need to connect this database with our django project. To do that, move into /django/src/test_project directory and open settings.py file in any text editor and do the following changes. I'm using nano for this tutorial.

Enter these values carefully as they are crucial for connecting mysql with django. In ALLOWED_HOSTS block, enter your Ubuntu server's public ip-address.

nano /django/src/test_project/settings.py

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['66.55.44.33']

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        'NAME': 'test_db',
        'USER': 'test_user',
        'PASSWORD': 'password',
        'HOST': 'localhost',
        'PORT': '3306',
    }
}

After defining database details, scroll down to the static files section where we need to provide path of our static and media files. Use below lines:

STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATIC_ROOT = '/django/files/public/static'
MEDIA_ROOT = '/django/files/public/media'
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'

Now save and close the file. To test our Django application, use below command in /django/src directory to start django server:

python manage.py makemigrations

python manage.py migrate

python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

If everything is configured correctly, you will see message Starting development server at http://0.0.0.0:8000/. It means your server is up and running. Go to your browser and use your public ip-address that you entered in ALLOWED_HOSTS earlier with port 8000. In my case, I can access my server from 66.55.44.33:8000. if you get the welcome screen message like this image below means everything works as expected.

Now our django website is successfully connected with MySQL database. You can deactivate the virtual environment using deactivate command. Next part is to use Apache webserver as frontend to server our web application to users. We have already installed required packages for Apache to run with Django. Next section is about creating virtual host configuration files for our Python Django Application.

Configuring Apache webserver with Django

In these steps we will see how we can use Apache web server to serve our Django application using WSGi module. As I'm demonstrating this project on Ubuntu, therefore server configuration files that we need to create, can be located at /etc/apache2/sites-available directory. Go to this directory and follow the commands below:

mv /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf-backup

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/test_project.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName domain.com
    ServerAlias www.domain.com

    Alias /static /django/files/public/static
    <Directory /django/files/public/static>
            Require all granted
    </Directory>

    Alias /media /django/files/public/media
    <Directory /django/files/public/media>
        Require all granted
    </Directory>

    <Directory /django/src/test_project>
        <Files wsgi.py>
            Require all granted
        </Files>
    </Directory>
                        
    WSGIDaemonProcess test_project python-home=/django/venv python-path=/django/src
    WSGIProcessGroup test_project
    WSGIScriptAlias / /django/src/test_project/wsgi.py

    ErrorLog /django/data/log/error.log
    CustomLog /django/data/log/access.log combine
</VirtualHost>

Write your domain name in ServerName and ServerAlias. If you are using the same directory structure as i demonstrated in this project, you don't have to change anything else. But if you changed the structure, then you have to updated the paths here.

Save the file and run a2ensite test_project.conf command to activate that virtual host that we just created for our django website. If there is no output in the terminal, It means the configuration is enabled successfully. Reload the Apache webserver using systemctl reload apache2 command to complete the process.

Now our Django website is up and running with Apache acting as the front end and interacting with Django using WSGi module. You can confirm it by opening the web browser and go to your public ip-address.

Common Django errors in deployment

Truncated or oversized response headers received from daemon process 'django_process':
/django/project/data/wsgi.py
/django/venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages/imageio/core/util.py:10: UserWarning: NumPy was imported from a Python
sub-interpreter but NumPy does not properly support sub-interpreters. This will likely work for most users but might
cause hard to track down issues or subtle bugs. A common use of the rare sub-interpreter feature is wsgi which also
allows single-interpreter mode.
Improvements in the case of bugs are welcome, but is not on the NumPy roadmap, and full support may require
significant effort to achieve.
import numpy as np
                            

WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}

WSGIProcessGroup test_project
WSGIScriptAlias / /path/to/file/wsgi.py process-group=test_project application-group=%{GLOBAL}