2015-02-14-how-to-run-bottle-uwsgi-nginx.markdown

layout	title	categories	tags	lang	author
post	Running your Python Bottle application on Nginx using uWSGI	development	guide, getting-started, python	en	thoorium

Bottle is a fast, simple and lightweight WSGI micro web-framework for Python. Coupled with uWSGI and Nginx bottle will reach high performances to serve and distribute your content.

This setup will make use of uWSGI as the application server because the built-in Bottle web server is very slow and should only be used for development. uWSGI is capable of spawning new process of you application and will scale your application when needed.

1. Installing Python, Bottle, uWSGI and Nginx

---

In this guide we will be using Debian Wheezy as our host OS. Getting everything installed is easy thanks to the wonderful package manager.

Everything can be installed in a single apt-get which is available below:

sudo apt-get install python2.7 python-pip uwsgi uwsgi-plugin-python nginx

This will install Python, pip (Python package manager), uWSGI, the uWSGI Python plugin and Nginx. uWSGI does not know how to handle Python applications by default and requires the Python plugin in order to function for our needs.

2. Hello Runabove

---

For this example we will create a basic Hello Runabove bottle application that goes like this:

import bottle

from bottle import route, template

@route('/')# Handle HTTP GET for the application root
def index():
    return template('<h1>{{message}}</h1>', message='Hello Runabove')

# Run bottle internal test server when invoked directly ie: non-uxsgi mode
if __name__ == '__main__':
    bottle.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=8080)
# Run bottle in application mode. Required in order to get the application working with uWSGI!
else:
    app = application = bottle.default_app()

Name the file app.py and save it to the following destination

/usr/share/nginx/www/hello-runabove

This application will return a simple "Hello Runabove!" when visited from the web.

You can clone the full Hello Runabove at the following address: https://github.com/Thoorium/hello-runabove

3. Setting up Bottle and the virtual environment

---

A good practice with Python is to contain all project's dependencies in a "virtualenv". A virtualenv is lightweight space where a project can have its own dependencies without interfering with system wide python packages. As a second benefit, you won't need to be root anymore to install from pip.

Thanks to the python package manager, pip, installing Bottle in a virtual environment is a very simple task that requires very few commands.

Let's start by installing the virtualenv package:

sudo pip install virtualenv

Now with the virtual environment package installed, we can create a virtual environment for our application:

cd /usr/share/nginx/www/hello-runabove
sudo virtualenv venv-bottle
sudo venv-bottle/bin/pip install bottle

This will create a directory will all the dependencies your python application need to run. By doing so you will prevent any sort of conflicts between python applications if different versions of the same package are used!

4. Configure uWSGI

---

In order to get uWSGI to run your bottle application, you will first need to create a configuration file for your application. The configuration file is stored in apps-available and must be copied over to apps-enabled to work. Both directories are located under /etc/uwsgi/.

Now let's create the uWSGI configuration file. You can use the following commands to do so:

cd /etc/uwsgi/apps-available
sudo nano hello-runabove.ini

The basic structure of the configuration file looks like the following:

[uwsgi]
socket = /run/uwsgi/app/hello-runabove/socket
chdir = /usr/share/nginx/www/hello-runabove
master = true
plugins = python
file = app.py
virtualenv = venv-bottle
uid = www-data
gid = www-data
vacuum = true

In order to get uWSGI to start your application, you need to replicate your configuration file in the apps-enabled folder. We will be using a simple symlink to "copy" over the file. This will make maintenance of the configuration easier in the future as you will only need to edit the file in apps-available to make the changes in both places.

sudo ln -s /etc/uwsgi/apps-available/hello-runabove.ini /etc/uwsgi/apps-enabled/hello-runabove.ini

Finish by starting the uWSGI service.

sudo service uwsgi start

You can read more about uWSGI configuration at https://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Configuration.html

5. Configure Nginx

---

Now that uWSGI is running and created a socket for us to use, let's configure Nginx to listen to this socket.

Nginx needs a configuration file for you application in the sites-available directory and a copy of it in the sites-enabled directory. Both directories are located under /etc/nginx/. Now let's create our configuration file.

cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
sudo nano hello-runabove

Our Hello Runabove Nginx configuration file will look like this:

upstream _hello-runabove {
    server unix:/run/uwsgi/app/hello-runabove/socket;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name ServerAddressOrDomainHere;

    location / {
        try_files $uri @uwsgi;
    }

    location @uwsgi {
        include uwsgi_params;
        uwsgi_pass _hello-runabove;
    }
}

Finally, we copy the config to sites-enabled using a symlink:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/hello-runabove /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/hello-runabove

Now that we have created the configuration file, let's start Nginx

sudo service nginx start

6. Test it

---

Congratulations! Your bottle application is now running live. Navigate to the address you have configured during step 4 and see it by yourself.

Troubleshooting

If you are having trouble installing the packages via apt-get, you might need to update your package list. Do so using the following command:

sudo apt-get update