In a previous guide I showed how to use Passenger (aka mod_rails) to work with Python (WSGI) scripts. While this proved effective for simple wsgi applications, a framework such as Django required a bit more love. This guide assume you already have everything installed from the previous guide, and that Python has already been configured with Django and other modules.

Aside from having the usual setup, you will need the original Django source files. One way of going about this is downloading the latest source from the Django Project. The next couple of steps assume you have nginx installed at the /usr/local/nginx/ location, and already have a src folder under your home folder.

# cd ~/src
# wget http://www.djangoproject.com/download/
# tar zxvf Django-1.1.tar.gz
# cd Django-1.1
# mv ./django /usr/local/nginx/html

I should note, my /html/ folder isn’t publicly accessible because all my sites are subfolders under that location. I use it primarily to store resources for the folders beneath it. You can change where you save the source, just remember where you put it and that the webserver has access to it.

Open up your nginx configuration where you have already setup a passenger app from the previous guide. Should look something like this.

server {
	server_name project.domain.com;
	root /usr/local/nginx/html/project.domain.com/public/;
	passenger_enabled on;
}

The first thing you have to do to set this up for Django (at the very least), is to modify the server block above to something more like this:

server {
	server_name project.domain.com;
 
	location / {
		root /usr/local/nginx/html/project.domain.com/public/;
		passenger_enabled on;
	}
 
	location /media {
		alias /usr/local/nginx/html/django/contrib/admin/media;
	}
}

Now you have either create or move your django application into the site folder. For example, if your site is defined as /usr/local/nginx/html/project.domain.com like above, and your django application is called mytest , you will end up having it located in /usr/local/nginx/html/project.domain.com/mytest. In the end you should have a folder structure similar to this (based off the Django tutorials).

Now open up the passenger_wsgi.py from the previous guide which may look something like this:

import sys
import os
 
def application(environ, start_response):
	start_response("200 OK", [])
	ret = ["%s: %s\n" % (key, value)
		for key, value in environ.iteritems()]
	return ret

We’re going to turn this into a WSGI initializer for the Django application like so:

import os, sys
 
#automatically finds application's current path
nginx_configuration= os.path.dirname(__file__)
project = os.path.dirname(nginx_configuration)
workspace = os.path.dirname(project)
sys.path.append(workspace) 
 
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'testapp.settings'
import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

After saving, should restart the nginx server, then load up the site in a browser. If this is a new Django application you’ll be greeted with a “Welcome to Django” page, otherwise the application you had already created.

Static content can be access by creating additional Aliases in Nginx, or by using django.views.static.serve method in your applications url settings.