Deploying Django on AWS EC2 with Gunicorn and Nginx

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. Deploying your Django application directly onto an EC2 instance gives you ultimate control over your server environment.

The Architecture

When deploying Django to production, you cannot use the built-in runserver. Instead, the standard stack consists of:

1. Nginx: A highly efficient web server that handles incoming HTTP requests and serves static files directly.
2. Gunicorn: A Python WSGI HTTP Server that sits behind Nginx and translates web requests into a format Django understands.
3. Django: Your application code.

Provisioning the EC2 Instance

1. Log into your AWS Console and navigate to EC2.
2. Launch a new instance, selecting an Ubuntu Server AMI.
3. Configure your Security Groups to allow incoming traffic on ports 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS), and 22 (SSH).
4. SSH into your instance.

Setting up Gunicorn

Once your code is on the server, you'll configure Gunicorn as a systemd service. This ensures your Django application restarts automatically if the server reboots.

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

[Service]
User=ubuntu
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu/myproject
ExecStart=/home/ubuntu/myproject/venv/bin/gunicorn --access-logfile - --workers 3 --bind unix:/home/ubuntu/myproject/myproject.sock myproject.wsgi:application

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Configuring Nginx

Finally, Nginx needs to be configured to pass traffic to your Gunicorn socket.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location /static/ {
        root /home/ubuntu/myproject;
    }

    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/home/ubuntu/myproject/myproject.sock;
    }
}

This setup provides a highly robust, scalable, and battle-tested environment for your Python applications.