Hosting Django app with Waitress

Question

I'm trying to host a Django app on my Ubuntu VPS. I've got python, django, and waitress installed and the directories moved over.

I went to the Waitress site ( http://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/waitress/en/latest/ ) and they said to use it like this:

from waitress import serve
serve(wsgiapp, host='5.5.5.5', port=8080)

Do I put my app name in place of of 'wsiapp'? Do I need to run this in the top-level Django project directory?

Answer 1

Tested with Django 1.9 and Waitress 0.9.0

You can use waitress with your django application by creating a script (e.g., server.py) in your django project root and importing the application variable from wsgi.py module:

yourdjangoproject project root structure

├── manage.py
├── server.py
├── yourdjangoproject
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   ├── wsgi.py

wsgi.py (Updated January 2021 w/ static serving)

This is the default django code for wsgi.py:

import os
    
from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
    
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "yourdjangoproject.settings")
    
application = get_wsgi_application()

If you need static file serving, you can edit wsgi.py use something like whitenoise or dj-static for static assets:

import os

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application

os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "yourdjangoproject.settings")

"""
YOU ONLY NEED ONE OF THESE.
Choose middleware to serve static files. 
WhiteNoise seems to be the go-to but I've used dj-static 
successfully in many production applications.
"""

# If using WhiteNoise:
from whitenoise import WhiteNoise
application = WhiteNoise(get_wsgi_application())

# If using dj-static:
from dj_static import Cling
application = Cling(get_wsgi_application())

server.py

from waitress import serve
    
from yourdjangoproject.wsgi import application
    
if __name__ == '__main__':
    serve(application, port='8000')

Usage

Now you can run $ python server.py

Answer 2

I managed to get it working by using a bash script instead of a python call. I made a script called 'startserver.sh' containing the following (replace yourprojectname with your project name obviously):

#!/bin/bash
waitress-serve --port=80 yourprojectname.wsgi:application

I put it in the top-level Django project directory.

Changed the permissions to execute by owner:

chmod 700 startserver.sh

Then I just execute the script on the server:

sudo ./startserver.sh

And that seemed to work just fine.