Migrating from Apache to Nginx with the Edison Build System

I’ve recently decided to take the plunge and move from Apache and Mod_WSGI to Nginx and FastCGI – I was amazed at how simple it was!

To get Edison up and running under Nginx as a fast-cgi Deamon, you just need to do the following:

Install the required packages from EPEL:

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

yum update

yum install nginx pypthon-flup

The configure a new server (we’ll setup a fake dns hostname of ‘edison.localdomain’) in /etc/nginx/conf.d/edison as follows:

    server {
    # setup the server name
    server_name edison.localdomain;

    # make sure we’re only listening on HTTPS
    listen 443;

    ssl                  on;
    ssl_certificate      /path/to/ssl/edison.localdomain.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key  /path/to/ssl/edison.localdomain.key;

    # Point to the document root
    root /var/djangosites/edison/;

    # setup logging
    error_log /var/log/nginx/edison.localdomain.error;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/edison.localdomain.access;

    # Setup the alias for the Media Directory
    location /media {
    alias /var/djangosites/edison/media/;
    }

    # setup the fastcgi settings
    location / {
    # host and port to fastcgi server
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8801;
    fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
    fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port;
    fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol;
    fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
    fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
    fastcgi_param REMOTE_USER       $remote_user;
    fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR       $remote_addr;
    fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT       $remote_port;
    fastcgi_pass_header Authorization;
    fastcgi_intercept_errors off;
    }
    }

Once that’s in place, restart NGinx and then cd to the Edison App dir and run the following command:

./manage.py runfcgi method=threaded host=127.0.0.1 port=8801

This will start the fast-cgi python script.

Now you can visit https://edison.localdomain/ (assuming it is setup in your DNS!) and you should be able to browse Edison without any issue.