Production Setup

Although there are many HTTP proxies available, we strongly advise that you use Nginx. If you choose another proxy server you need to make sure that it buffers slow clients. Without this buffering Gunicorn will be easily susceptible to Denial-Of-Service attacks.

Nginx Config

An example configuration file for use with Nginx:

worker_processes 1;

user nobody nogroup;
pid /tmp/nginx.pid;
error_log /tmp/nginx.error.log;

events {
    worker_connections 1024;
    accept_mutex off;
}

http {
    include mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;
    access_log /tmp/nginx.access.log combined;
    sendfile on;

    upstream app_server {
        server unix:/tmp/gunicorn.sock fail_timeout=0;
        # For a TCP configuration:
        # server 192.168.0.7:8000 fail_timeout=0;
    }

    server {
        listen 80 default;
        client_max_body_size 4G;
        server_name _;

        keepalive_timeout 5;

        # path for static files
        root /path/to/app/current/public;

        location / {
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
            proxy_redirect off;

            if (!-f $request_filename) {
                proxy_pass http://app_server;
                break;
            }
        }

        error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
        location = /500.html {
            root /path/to/app/current/public;
        }
    }
}

Daemon Monitoring

A popular method for deploying Gunicorn is to have it monitored by runit. An example service definition:

#!/bin sh

GUNICORN=/usr/local/bin/gunicorn
ROOT=/path/to/project
PID=/var/run/gunicorn.pid

APP=main:application

if [ -f $PID ]; then rm $PID fi

cd $ROOT
exec $GUNICORN -C $ROOT/gunicorn.conf.py --pidfile=$PID $APP