Running TurboGears behind Nginx as a Reverse Proxy

Contents

• Running TurboGears behind Nginx as a Reverse Proxy
  • Alternative solution
  • References

Nginx is a fast and light HTTP server, reverse proxy, load balancer (and more).

It’s pretty simple to get TurboGears set up behind a Nginx server so that it proxies requests to the CherryPy server. Here is a sample configuration that not only proxies to your TurboGears application, but serves static content with Nginx and load balances between two TurboGears application instances as well.

http {
    # boilerplate nginx config ...

    upstream mycluster {
        server 127.0.0.1:8000;
        server 127.0.0.1:8001;
    }

    server {
        listen 80;

        # static files
        location ^~ /static/  {
            root /path/to/YourProject/package;
        }
        location = /favicon.ico  {
            root /path/to/YourProject/package/static/images;
        }

        # proxy to turbogears app
        location / {
            proxy_pass          http://mycluster;
            proxy_redirect      off;
            proxy_set_header    Host $host;
            proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-Host $server_name;
        }
    }
}

Next you need to setup a couple TurboGears backends that will comprise the cluster:

Edit your production configuration (e.g. prod.cfg) and add/change the following lines:

server.socket_host = '127.0.0.1'
server.socket_port = 8000

Copy prod.cfg to prod2.cfg and change the server.socket_port option:

server.socket_host = '127.0.0.1'
server.socket_port = 8001

Start both instances of your app:

$ python start-myproject.py prod.cfg &
$ python start-myproject.py prod2.cfg &

That’s it! Nginx should now be passing requests across both backends transparently.

Alternative solution

As an alternative solution, you can make use of the uwsgi Nginx module and replace CherryPy with the uWSGI server.

References

You can find more information and recipes for setting up Nginx on the Nginx wiki.