如何使网站与Django开发服务器兼容？

Question

I understand that this is never to be done. But I have a situation where I need to get something done real quick. I have to do a website where may be 200 people would register for an event. I need to present a simple registration form. Very basic functionality, register and view list of registrants. Very few hits. It would be live for about a month or so.

I know a little bit of Django which can allow me to put together this thing quickly. However, I have only worked with the Django development server.

My problem is setting up Apache to work with Django. I understand that, for Django, I need mod_wsgi installed. I have a VPS but mod_wsgi is not installed. I have asked my hosting provider to install it for me. Even if I can get mod_wsgi installed, it appears that it may take me some time to configure it and it may take a while.

I have the following questions.

1. Can I run this website on the Django development server? Will it hold up for very light traffic?
2. If I do, how do I get traffic to go from port 80 to the development server port. From the landing page, I can have the port number added to all the subsequent URLs.

I would also appreciate some guidance on getting Django to work with mod_wsgi.

Thanks

Answer 1

I use cloud9 for development. It is essentially a cloud ubuntu 14 virtual box, so it gives you a real url when django server is running (on port 80). Another use case of cloud 9 is for university classes, which is similar to your event use case. You can go there and setup your django project for free and people can find the page normally. But there are some restarts in your workspace that prevents it to be real server. If you pay 20 bucks per month they give you 2 premium workspaces that they assure that this does not happen ever. But I'm not sure if this is a good idea. I could not even imagine what kind of errors would you get if all 200 people chose to login at the same time, for example.

Another way to go is making a free amazon AWS account (or digital ocean) and doing your deploy there. AWS have 1 year free trial if you run only one microinstance with a particular setup which is plenty of time for your use case. I open the instance on AWS and SSH into it with cloud 9, so it feels like developing even in production. I'm far from a devops expert but I could deploy Nginx, gunicorn, django in AWS following this tutorial. You can do it too for sure, but is a lot of work.

Left my prefered choice for your use case to the end: pythonanywhere . It has free trial and it's really easy to setup. You follow some very basic steps (doing stuff with mod_wsgi that I still dont understand) and make it work in minutes. It's a whole business dedicated to serve python programs.

Hope this helps