Apache setup

Apache is heavier than Nginx. But it’s also much more famous:

• more people will be able to help you on forums;
• your hosting will most probably support Apache;
• the configuration file syntax is familiar to a lot of people.

An Apache setup is still much more robust and secure than an easy installation.

Une installation apache est aussi beaucoup plus solide et sécurisé qu’une installation facile. You’ll benefit from having:

• the possiblity to have several projects listening to the port 80;
• several Apache module at your disposal (like requests throttling);
• Apache robustness in front end: it’s secure, and there is much less chance it will crash under heavy load;
• your web site processes won’t run with admin rights, even if –user doesn’t work on your OS.

Mod_wsgi

The modern Web Python servers all work the same way, following an norm for interfacing: WSGI.

This is the most performante solution, and the best to use. But it will require the setup of the Apache module mod_wsgi. If you don’t know how to do this, or if you can’t do it (E.G: your hosting won’t let you), you need to go for the CGI setup.

First, make sure you have mod_wsgi installed and enable by running (as admin):

a2enmod wsgi

This enable mod_wsgi. It it doesn’t, install it first (on ubuntu, the package is libapache2-mod-wsgi).

Then create an Apache configuration file, usually in /etc/apache/sites-available/. Name it zerobin:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.yourwebsite.com

    WSGIDaemonProcess zerobin user=www-data group=www-data processes=1 threads=5
    WSGIScriptAlias / /path/to/zerobin/app.wsgi

    <Directory /path/to/zerobin/zerobin/>
        WSGIProcessGroup zerobin
        WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Activate the website (as admin):

a2ensite zerobin

And reload the apache configuration (as admin):

service apache2 reload

You’ll note that we refer to a file named app.wsgi. It’s a Python file creating the application Apache is going to use to start the Python process:

import os, sys

# make sure the zerobin module is in the PYTHON PATH and importable
ZEROBIN_PARENT_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(__file__))
sys.path.insert(0, ZEROBIN_PARENT_DIR)

# create the wsgi callable
from zerobin.routes import get_app
settings, application = get_app(compressed_static=True)

You can of course create your own, as the get_app function is the only way to pass settings to 0bin with this setup. You would do this by creating a configuration file and passing it to the function:

import os, sys

ZEROBIN_PARENT_DIR = '/path/to/zerobin/parent/dir'
sys.path.insert(0, ZEROBIN_PARENT_DIR)

from zerobin.routes import get_app
settings, application = get_app(settings_file='/path/to/settings.py')

CGI

You can also run 0bin using CGI, but infortunaly we didn’t have time to cover it yet. Please contact us if you ever get the need to use it.