Nginx Configuration

Although there are many HTTP proxies available, we strongly advise that you use Nginx. If you choose another proxy server you need to make sure that it buffers slow clients when you use default Gunicorn workers. Without this buffering Gunicorn will be easily susceptible to denial-of-service attacks. You can use slowloris to check if your proxy is behaving properly.

An example configuration file for fast clients with Nginx:

worker_processes 1;

user nobody nogroup;
pid /tmp/nginx.pid;
error_log /tmp/nginx.error.log;

events {
    worker_connections 1024;
    accept_mutex off;
}

http {
    include mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;
    access_log /tmp/nginx.access.log combined;
    sendfile on;

    upstream app_server {
        server unix:/tmp/gunicorn.sock fail_timeout=0;
        # For a TCP configuration:
        # server 192.168.0.7:8000 fail_timeout=0;
    }

    server {
        listen 80 default;
        client_max_body_size 4G;
        server_name _;

        keepalive_timeout 5;

        # path for static files
        root /path/to/app/current/public;

        location / {
            # checks for static file, if not found proxy to app
            try_files $uri @proxy_to_app;
        }

        location @proxy_to_app {
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
            proxy_redirect off;

            proxy_pass   http://app_server;
        }

        error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
        location = /500.html {
            root /path/to/app/current/public;
        }
    }
}

If you want to be able to handle streaming request/responses or other fancy features like Comet, Long polling, or Web sockets, you need to turn off the proxy buffering. When you do this you must run with one of the async worker classes.

To turn off buffering, you only need to add proxy_buffering off; to your location block:

...
location / {
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_redirect off;
    proxy_buffering off;

    if (!-f $request_filename) {
        proxy_pass http://app_server;
        break;
    }
}
...

Using Virtualenv

To serve an app from a Virtualenv it is generally easiest to just install Gunicorn directly into the Virtualenv. This will create a set of Gunicorn scripts for that Virtualenv which can be used to run applications normally.

If you have Virtualenv installed, you should be able to do something like this:

$ mkdir ~/venvs/
$ virtualenv ~/venvs/webapp
$ source ~/venvs/webapp/bin/activate
$ ~/venvs/webapp/bin/easy_install -U gunicorn
$ deactivate

Then you just need to use one of the three Gunicorn scripts that was installed into ~/venvs/webapp/bin.

Monitoring

#!/bin/sh

GUNICORN=/usr/local/bin/gunicorn
ROOT=/path/to/project
PID=/var/run/gunicorn.pid

APP=main:application

if [ -f $PID ]; then rm $PID; fi

cd $ROOT
exec $GUNICORN -c $ROOT/gunicorn.conf.py --pid=$PID $APP

[program:gunicorn]
command=/path/to/gunicorn main:application -c /path/to/gunicorn.conf.py
directory=/path/to/project
user=nobody
autostart=true
autorestart=true
redirect_stderr=True