Introduction
I have always wanted to deploy a website on my own web server. However, owning a small PC or a laptop just to use as a Linux server was quite bothersome. To assist my laziness, Amazon provides a very smooth service as to what we refer as the 'cloud'. I am pretty sure that almost everyone has at least heard of the word 'cloud' in today's world. In this post, I will be using the Amazon cloud elsewise called the AWS (Amazon Web Services) to host my django website on its EC2 instance.
EC2 Instance
Well according to Amazon themselves, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.
EC2 instances are virtual machines that run on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. So yeah now you don't need to physically have a web server in your room to host your own website!
Another attractive trait is that EC2 instances are created from Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), which are pre-configured virtual machine images. This means that you don't even need to install a Linux or maybe Windows server yourself! Enough talk, I will now go straight into how to actually do this ๐
If you don't have an account with the AWS cloud, I would recommend you to create one. You can check this article and follow the steps if you are pretty new with the cloud: https://k21academy.com/amazon-web-services/aws-solutions-architect/create-aws-free-tier-account/
Creating an EC2 Instance
Yes, we need to create the server first. But no worries, it is quite simple and will take few clicks.
Once you are logged in to your AWS console, you will be able to see countless services under "services" bar.
No need to panic as we are only looking at one and that is the EC2 instance service.
Once you click on the "EC2", you will redirected to the EC2 dashboard which should look like this
๐ Just a note that I already have a web server running so that is why it is showing 1 against "Instances(running)"
Right under this table, you should be able to see "Launch instance"
Once you are in, there will be an option to name your instance, choose an AMI, the operating system image that you want to run on your instance.
You can choose whatever but just be careful as some images cost you
Once you have chosen your OS image you will be greeted to choose an instance type. The default option would probably be the Free tier compatible t2.micro
instance
Now, we need a key pair. This is used for SSH-ing to your EC2 instance. Proceeding without a key pair isn't recommended but it is possible to select none.
Next comes the network settings from where you can choose your VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
Inside this network setting, there is very important thing you need to set up, the firewall
In the AWS world, these are called 'security groups'. As you can see that the name and description along with SSH port 22 inbound rule is set by default.
I will add a Custom TCP port 8000 and a HTTP port 80 allowed from anywhere rule so that we can actually test our django website running
You can always limit the IP address to whatever range or specific IP addresses as you like
And this is it. You can just click on "Launch Instance".
You can see that your instance is running
You can now access your instance using SSH or directly via AWS console.
Deploying your django website
This is the interesting part now. Once you are in your instance it is time to install the apache server and related tools
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-pip apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3
The first command is to update apt package manager in Ubuntu. The second command installs apache2, pip3, and mod-wsgi(module used in Apache, for running Django server, and will be enabled automatically upon installation)
We will also need the virtual env to help with dependencies
sudo pip3 install virtualenv
Creating an empty directory
mkdir django
Now inside this directory I will be setting up the virtualenv as well as cloning my website from Github
cd django
virtualenv myprojectenv
git clone "https://github.com/<username>/<repository name>.git"
Activating the virtualenv
source myprojectenv/bin/activate
Once the virtualenv is activated, we have to collect static files. For this, we need to use the vim editor
sudo vi config/settings.py
๐config
is the project name that contains the settings.py
Once we are inside the settings.py
, we just need to add this line at the end
import os
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "static/")
STATICFILES = [STATIC_ROOT]
Also, we need to allow the instance's public IP address as well
ALLOWED_HOSTS=['EC2 Public IP address']
Finally, as we are deploying in the production environment, we need to set debug to false
DEBUG = False
This is it for the settings.py
file
Installing the required modules with the pip command
pip install -r requirements.txt
๐ if your repository doesn't have a requirements.txt
file, please ensure that you have all of the dependencies installed
Migrating the database and collecting static file with the following
python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py collectstatic
This will allow you to actually see your django website running if your run your django local server with the port 8000. However, this is not the optimal way as you don't want to use that. Instead, we want our website to run on the Apache server
Apache Server Configuration
We just need to tweak the configuration file that's all ๐. To access the config file for apache,
sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
Just need to replace the file contents with this
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
Alias /static /home/ubuntu/django/Test/static
<Directory /home/ubuntu/django/Test/static>
Require all granted
</Directory>
<Directory /home/ubuntu/django/Test/config>
<Files wsgi.py>
Require all granted
</Files>
</Directory>
WSGIPassAuthorization On
WSGIDaemonProcess Test python-path=/home/ubuntu/django/Test/ python-home=/home/ubuntu/django/myprojectenv
WSGIProcessGroup Test
WSGIScriptAlias / /home/ubuntu/django/Test/config/wsgi.py
</VirtualHost>
๐ As mentioned before, the config
is the project name and Test
is repository name that I cloned. You will have to make sure the paths are correct and according to naming of directories and files in the Django project
And the configuration is done! But not so fast, there are some final touches.
Changing some permissions and ownership of the directory
chmod 664 ~/django/Test/db.sqlite3
sudo chown :www-data ~/django/Test/db.sqlite3
sudo chown :www-data ~/django/Test
sudo chown :www-data ~/django/Test/config
And this is it! You just need to restart the apache service and you are good to go ๐
Access your website over the internet using the EC2 instance's public IP address โ
sudo service apache2 restart
๐ If for some reason the above gives a permission error, you can try giving 755 permissions to the ~ directory
sudo chmod 755 /home/ubuntu
Conclusion
This was only an illustration of how to set up Apache and Django on AWS
When installing a production server, a number of additional variables are involved
Security is one of the most crucial aspects to pay attention to
We can restrict access to the server to a small number of IP addresses, which is great for testing and development
AWS technologies like Security Groups and IAM users can be useful for all of these uses
Final note that Django programs may be more easily deployed by using the AWS Beanstalk service
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