Ready to go Django deployment with AWS

This repository automates the process of setting up a basic Django production environment. This is intended to provide a productive medium for beginners to both learn about deployment and have an application deployed.

What you will need:

• Packer installed
• An AWS account
• Your project located on a remote repository (in this case github)

Note: The ease of this process depends on whether you have already launched an EC2 instance from the AWS console.

Packer

The builder in the packer template creates a t2.micro (free tier) AMI with Ubuntu-14.04-x64.

The provisioners used are a remote shell to set up the python environment and chef-solo which utilizes the accompanying chef cookbook in order to automate the setup of the NGINX and Gunicorn Configurations.

To run the script:

FIRST:

You will need to modify the two files contained within cookbooks/server_setup/files directory and the remote_shell.sh file. Further instruction on how to do this is provided in the comments of each files.

Note:If you neglect to modify these files, or do so improperly you WILL encounter errors.

SECOND:

With your AWS credentials stored as environment variables run the following in the command line:

packer build django_web_server

THIRD:

Launch the instance from the AWS console. Make sure to add HTTP to your security groups. Once you have logged into the server, you will need to cd into the directory containing your manage.py and enter python manage.py runserver.

Exit from the server and, with your browser, proceed to the public DNS provided in the console description for the instance.

Congratulations! Your Django application is now public.

CAUTION:

If you make any changes to the config files after you have launched the instance, you will need to restart that service.

sudo service [service_name] [command]

In our case, the commands for the two services (which correspond the two config files in the cookbook) we are mainly concerned with are:

sudo service nginx restart
sudo service virtualized restart

Author's Note

I created this project as a way to make the deployment of a basic Django application a little easier. I will continue to update this project as I learn more about system administration and Amazon Web Services.

Future goals:

• Reduce the pre-build changes to a single file
• Add in PostgreSQL support
• Add S3 support