Setup Django on Un-Managed VPS

After some struggles to setup my django project on an unmanaged vps I put all the instructions that helped me into easy to follow setup. replace values surounded by <> with your own values

Server setup

Ubuntu setup with root or sudo the below if you dont have root access.

apt-get update

apt upgrade

apt-get install nginx

apt-get install systemd

apt-get install ufw

ufw allow 'Nginx Full'

ufw status

Python setup

apt-get install python3

apt-get install python3-pip

pip3 install virtualenv

Add new user and give user sudo

adduser <username>

usermod -a -G sudo <username>

Login with new user and continue.

Install and update django

cd ~

mkdir django-apps

cd django-apps

virtualenv env

source env/bin/activate

pip install django

pip install django gunicorn psycopg2

cd ~/django-apps

django-admin startproject <mysite>

you can now run your development server to test your setup for development

~/django-apps/<mysite>/python manage.py runserver <yourIP>:8000

after your site has been set up and you are ready to go into production in the settings.py file of your project change the following:

DEBUG = False
...
ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['<yourIP>', '<yourdomain.com>']
...
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static')
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
...
MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'media_root')
MEDIA_URL = '/media_root/'

run

python manage.py collectstatic

this command will collect all the static files of your project into the directories specified in the settings.py file. We will later point our nginx files to these directories to serv up these files. Next run

deactivate

to close out the virtualevn in order to continue the rest of the setup.

Gunicorn setup

in /etc/systemd/system/ create a new file called gunicorn.service and add the below code to that file and save:

[Unit]
Description=gunicorn daemon
After=network.target

[Service]
User=<username>
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/home/<username>/django-apps/<mysite>
ExecStart=/home/<username>/django-apps/env/bin/python3 /home/<username>/django-apps/env/bin/gunicorn --access-logfile - --workers 3 --bind unix:/home/<username>/django-apps/<mysite>.sock <mysite>.wsgi:application

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

run the below commands to start and enable gunicorn.

sudo systemctl start gunicorn

sudo systemctl enable gunicorn

check the status of gunicorn with the below command. If there are issues check that the gunicorn.service file was setup correctly.

sudo systemctl status gunicorn

if you fixed any issues with gunicorn remember to run the below commands to reload the deamon and gunicorn

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl restart gunicorn

Nginx setup

go to /etc/nginx/sites-available/ and create <mysite> file and add the below setup

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name <servername>;

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location /static {
        root /home/<username>/django-apps/<mysite>;
    }

    location /media_root {
        root /home/<username>/django-apps/<mysite>;
    }


    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/home/<username>/django-apps/<mysite>.sock;
    }
}

after creating this file run the below command to add a shortcut of the file to the sites-enabled directory

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/<mysite> /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

nginx and gunicorn should now be fully setup and working. Run

sudo nginx -t

to check your nginx file for syntax errors. Then Run

sudo systemctl restart nginx

to restart nginx.

If there were any issues run sudo tail -30 /var/log/nginx/error.log to check the error logs.

Congrats your django site should be up and running.

Bonus

setup a SSL certificate using certbot

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install python-certbot-nginx

sudo certbot --nginx