Prepare

git clone https://github.com/whatifrussian/xkcd.ru.git
cd xkcd.ru
cp settings_local.py.template settings_local.py
./bin/random_key.py     # generate SECRET_KEY
edit settings_local.py  # change ADMINS and SECRET_KEY
cp urls_local.py.template urls_local.py
./manage.py syncdb

Update from old versions

Database scheme changed, so if you have not clean installation, you need to perform (for sqlite3):

sqlite3 xkcd.db < 'ALTER TABLE main.comics_comics ADD comment_title text NOT NULL DEFAULT "";'

Maybe Django can update database scheme itself, but I don’t try.

Run

For debug and testing purposes:

./manage.py runserver

Look at:

• http://localhost:8000/
• http://localhost:8000/login/
• http://localhost:8000/admin/
• http://localhost:8000/add/

Deploy

We consider nginx + uwsgi + django couple. Install they first.

Note: I don’t like package manager avoiding, so install these three packages into system using emerge (Gentoo package manager). If you prefer virtualenv or pip or something like, try it. But I will describe configuration as well as all needed packages installed info system.

xkcd.ru settings

Move repo root to /var/www/xkcd.ru. Recursively change directory owner to your webserver user:group ('nginx:nginx' in my case).

Keep im mind set DEBUG in settings_local.py to False after testing your deployment.

Run ./manage.py collectstatic in repo directory for collecting Django static files into static directory (virtually now only static/admin directory will be added). Nginx will be directly serve it.

Nginx settings

Let’s see deploy/nginx.conf file in this repo. This is slighly edited standart Gentoo nginx configuration file, changed only in server section. It assume that xkcd.ru directory (repo root) placed into /var/www/. You can copy file entirely or adopt server section for your preferences.

Nginx just serve static (and media) data and appeal to uwsgi (via Unix socket) for processing other queries.

uwsgi settings

Let’s see deploy/uwsgi.xkcd.ru. In Gentoo you can simply do:

cp deploy/uwsgi.xkcd.ru /etc/conf.d/
cd /etc/init.d/
ln -s uwsgi uwsgi.xkcd.ru
cd -
/etc/init.d/uwsgi.xkcd.ru start

Otherwise you can export all these variables and simply run

uwsgi --master --daemonize ${UWSGI_LOG_FILE} ${UWSGI_EXTRA_OPTIONS} --socket ${UWSGI_SOCKET} --processes ${UWSGI_PROCESSES} --pidfile /var/run/uwsgi_xkcd.ru/xkcd.ru.pid

Of course you can use start-stop-daemon or it’s wrapper as well as wrappers from uwsgi package from your distro.

Note: I use Python 3.4 as default, so use 'python34' plugin. And one more non-trivial detail: '--plugin python3X' option MUST placed before '--wsgi-file=wsgi.py' option.