Pylons 0.9.7-dev Nginx Deployment on a Two-Way Routed Xen Setup

10 Nov, 2007

On Dom0 set up port forwarding from port 80 to the DomU running NginX, in this case 10.0.0.1:

sudo -i
iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -i eth0 --dport 80 -j DNAT --to 10.0.0.1:80
exit

These get lost on each reboot unless you put them into a script in /etc/network/if-up.d/iptables but that's OK for the moment.

First install Nginx:

sudo apt-get install nginx

If you visit the URL of the Dom0 server you should see the Welcome to nginx! message served from Nginx on the DomU.

Next you need to setup Python and Pylons. Install python:

sudo apt-get install python mercurial

Get vitualenv:

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-0.9.1.tar.gz
tar zxfv virtualenv-0.9.1.tar.gz
cp virtualenv-0.9.1/virtualenv.py ./
rm virtualenv-0.9.1.tar.gz
rm -r virtualenv-0.9.1

Decide where you want your Pylons applications. I like mine in /var/web so lets create a test project:

sudo mkdir /var/web
sudo mkdir /var/web/test
sudo chown james:james /var/web/test

Setup a virtual environment:

james@vm2:~$ python virtualenv.py /var/web/test
New python executable in /var/web/test/bin/python
Installing setuptools.............................done.
james@vm2:~$ cd /var/web/test

Now you can install Pylons:

mkdir dep
cd dep
hg clone http://pylonshq.com/hg/pylons-dev
cd pylons-dev
../../bin/python setup.py develop

Now create a project:

mkdir src
cd src
../bin/paster create -t pylons Test

Now edit Test/test/config/middleware.py and set use_webop=True. Serve the app with:

cd Test/
../../bin/python setup.py develop
../../bin/easy_install sqlalchemy                        <-- So that beaker doesn't break
../../bin/paster serve --reload development.ini

That's it. Now you just need to setup Nginx to reverse proxy to the paste server running on port 5000.

Edit the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file so that the location / part looks like this:

location / {
    proxy_redirect          off;
    proxy_set_header        Host $host;
    proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    client_max_body_size    10m;
    client_body_buffer_size 128k;
    proxy_connect_timeout   90;
    proxy_send_timeout      90;
    proxy_read_timeout      90;
    proxy_buffer_size       4k;
    proxy_buffers           4 32k;
    proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
    proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
    proxy_pass  http://127.0.0.1:5000;
    proxy_redirect  default;
}

You'll then need to restart nginx and the paster server:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart
../../bin/paster serve --reload development

If you press refresh in your browser you should see the Pylons welcome page.

Copyright James Gardner 1996-2020 All Rights Reserved. Admin.