Running multiple django sites on a single server with gunicorn and nginx

When days are dark, friends are few, cash is low and we need to take our django sites and put them on a single server.

I am assuming you have site up and running that is using django with nginx and gunicorn. Now we need to do a few modifications to get the new site working.

First things first get the application code on the site, create your database, create your virtual environment, install your requirements, set any environment variables, migrate, collect static and create your super user. It is that easy (any issues see the guide above)

Creating 2 Gunicorn Services

We setup the nginx config using unix sockets instead of a local http port. So we used:

proxy_pass http://unix:/var/www/myfolder/mysocket.sock;

Instead of:

proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;

We then created a systemd service to start and stop guncorn for our site called /etc/systemd/system/gunicorn.service

What we need to do now is create a service for each site

Lets rename /etc/systemd/system/gunicorn.service to /etc/systemd/system/site1.gunicorn.service

Make a copy of this site and make relevant changes for the new folder location and socket etc. For a refresher of how this looks:

[Unit]
Description=gunicorn daemon
After=network.target
[Service]
User=
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/
ExecStart=/var/www//env/bin/gunicorn --access-logfile - --workers 3 --bind unix:/var/www//.sock config.wsgi:application
EnvironmentFile=/var/www//.gunicorn_env
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Creating another Nginx server block Config

Make a copy of your existing server config and the new config will look similar to the below, remember to set different log files now as we are hosting multiple sites on a single server.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name site1.co.za www.site1.co.za;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/site1.error.log
    access_log /var/log/nginx/site1.access.log

    location = /favicon.ico {
        access_log off;
        log_not_found off;
    }   

    location /static/ {
        alias /var/www/site1/site1/staticfiles/;
    }

    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/var/www/site1/site1.sock;
    }
}

Now to test if things are working:

1. Reload the daemon with sudo systemctl daemon-reload
2. Check the status of your new services sudo systemctl status site1.gunicorn.service
3. Start the services: sudo systemctl start site1.gunicorn.service

Remember to ensure your .guncorn_env file is in the project folder

Now we need to enable the nginx config:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/site1 /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Check you don’t have any types with: nginx -t

Then reload the service: sudo service nginx reload

Now everything should be working correctly.

I would like to thank Khophi for his recent post that pretty much guided me on the things to do to make this work in his post on running multiple django projects behind an nginx proxy