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A lot of Django app deployments over Amazon's EC2 use HTTP servers NGINX and Gunicorn.
I was wondering what they actually do and why both are used in parallel. What is the purpose of running them both in parallel?
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Nginx and Gunicorn work togetherGunicorn translates requests which it gets from Nginx into a format which your web application can handle, and makes sure that your code is executed when needed. They make a great team! Each can do something, which the other can't.
It is recommended in Gunicorn docs to run it behind a proxy server. Technically, you don't really need Nginx. BUT it's the Internet: your server will receive plenty of malformed HTTP requests which are made by bots and vulnerability scanner scripts.
Nginx is a web server and reverse-proxy responsible for serving static content, gzip compression, ssl, proxy_buffers and other HTTP stuff while gunicorn is a Python HTTP server that interfaces with both nginx and your actual python web-app code to serve dynamic content.
Gunicorn implements the Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI), which is a standard interface between web server software and web applications. Nginx is a web server. It's the public handler, more formally called the reverse proxy, for incoming requests and scales to thousands of simultaneous connections.
They aren't used in parallel. NGINX is a reverse proxy. It's first in line. It accepts incoming connections and decides where they should go next. It also (usually) serves static media such as CSS, JS and images. It can also do other things such as encryption via SSL, caching etc.
Gunicorn is the next layer and is an application server. NGINX sees that the incoming connection is for www.domain.com and knows (via configuration files) that it should pass that connection onto Gunicorn. Gunicorn is a WSGI server which is basically a:
simple and universal interface between web servers and web applications or frameworks
Gunicorn's job is to manage and run the Django instance(s) (similar to using django-admin runserver during development)
The contrast to this setup is to use Apache with the mod_wsgi module. In this situation, the application server is actually a part of Apache, running as a module.
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Nginx and Gunicorn are not used in parrallel.
The following diagrams shows how nginx and Gunicorn interact.
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