I'm going to walk through all the steps to deploy a Django application on a Ubuntu virtual instance. I use Digital Ocean droplets. But Amazon EC2 or other Linux instances with Ubuntu should be similar. Digital Ocean has some great guides on there for getting set up on various things, but I want to fill in some gaps and point out some minor troubles that I have had. It is not the most intuitive thing and there are a lot of little errors that can happen along the way and I need a reference. 1 - Set up a non root user on the droplet, with sudo privileges sudo adduser new_username sudo usermod -aG sudo new_username After following the prompts to set a password and set up the user, a new user named 'new_username' should be available. Now switch to the new user. sudo su new_username 2 - Set up ssh for the django repo on github, and pull the repo. ssh-keygen The above command will generate an ssh key that can be used to push/pull from the github repo. Go to github Profile->Settings->Access->SSH and GPG keys. From there copy and paste the ssh key that was generated from the above command into the appropriate textbox. The key will start with ssh-rsa. git clone git@github.com:github_username/reponame.git Now the repo should be on the instance. I keep my requirements.txt file on the repo to install all the dependencies from. 3 - Create a new virtualenv and install the project dependencies from a requirements.txt cd into the project directory created from cloning the repo. sudo apt-get install python3-pip pip3 install virtualenv python3 -m virtualenv venv source /venv/bin/activate Now we have a new virtual environment, activated and the name of it should be in parenthesis to the left of the shell. pip3 install -r requirements.txt All the requirements from the file should be ready to go. Next post I'll go over how to set up the apache webserver with gunicorn to serve the django application, and how to point the domain name to the IP that is serving the app.

mod_wsgi was giving me problems. Everything would work find while loading different parts of the website, until parts of the site that needed to access the database were visited, and then apache would get a wsgi:error. The thing is, it only happened once in a while. It seemed like after about 2-3 queries to the database a wsgi:error would be thrown. I'm still using apache, but I switched to gunicorn, and everything works great now. I had to change some of the settings.py so that I wouldn't get 403 errors at times in the admin area, since gunicorn runs behind a proxy. But after that, things are working great. I had the domain name working with the IP, until I changed to apache settings to allow for SSL. So that is next on the agenda. Getting the domain name working, and also SSL.

First post! Hopefully the first of many to come. Took me some time making the database readable by Apache, and some final tweaking with the settings.py file, but I am glad that everything works now (pretty well). I am getting some slow down when accessing the site, but there is only a basic 'wsgi' error showing up in the apache error logs. Basically, the site loads for a bit and then hangs. Now to get SSL working with certbot, and the domain pointed at the IP and things are looking good.