This fabfile along with the provided templates can spawn EC2 instances, install and configure a stateless Django stack on them (nginx + gunicorn with Amazon S3 for staticfiles).

Furthermore it can update your instances from a git repo stored on bitbucket [private repos are free on bitbucket so you can run private stuff on your server]

Ashok Fernandez

This was based on Fabulous by Giovanni Collazo.

• Download this repo and drag the fabfile folder into the root directory of your Django project.
• cd into the folder and run pip install -r requirements.txt

See an example here of how to setup your Django project using the following instructions.

• Create a folder in the root directory of your Django project called requirements that has three pip requirements files in it:

  • common.txt for all your common python dependancies between the server and local (add Django to this)
  • dev.txt for your local python dependancies
  • prod.txt for your server python dependancies (add boto, django-storages and psycopg2 to this)

• Create a folder where the settings.py of your Django project is located called settings that has four Python files in it

  • init.py
  • common.py for all your common Django settings
  • dev.py for your local Django settings
  • prod.py for your server Django settings

• At the top of both dev.py and prod.py add the line from <django_project_name>.settings.common import *

• Change the os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "<django_project_name>.settings") in both wsgi.py and manage.py to os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "<django_project_name>.settings.prod"). This means that the project with default to the production settings, however you can run it locally using python manage.py runserver --settings=<django_project_name>.settings.dev

• Setup a set of SSH keys for the bitbucket account where your repo is hosted

• Provision an S3 bucket for the staticfiles and add the following to settings/prod.py

    INSTALLED_APPS += ('storages',)
    AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = "<s3_staticfiles_bucket_name>"
    STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto.S3BotoStorage'
    S3_URL = 'http://%s.s3.amazonaws.com/' % AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME
    STATIC_URL = S3_URL
  

• Fill out the details in fabfile/project_conf.py

After all that work you can now run these commands which will execute across all your EC2 instances

• fab spawn instance

  • Spawns a new EC2 instance (as definied in project_conf.py) and return's it's public dns. This takes around 8 minutes to complete.

• fab update_packages

  • Updates the python packages on the server to match those found in requirements/common.txt and requirements/prod.txt

• fab deploy

  • Pulls the latest commit from the master branch on the server, collects the static files, syncs the db and
    restarts the server

• fab reload_gunicorn

  • Pushes the gunicorn startup script to the servers and restarts the gunicorn process, use this if you have made changes to templates/start_gunicorn.bash

• fab reload_nginx

  • Pushes the nginx config files to the servers and restarts the nginx, use this if you have made changes to templates/nginx-app-proxy or templates/nginx.conf

• fab reload_supervisor

  • Pushes the supervisor config files to the servers and restarts the supervisor, use this if you have made changes to templates/supervisord-init or templates/supervisord.conf

• fab manage:command="management command"

  • Runs a python manage.py command on the server. To run this command we need to specify an argument, eg for syncdb type the command -> fab manage:command="syncdb --no-input"