Configuration for Django WebSocket Application on Ubuntu Server

This tutorial will walk you through each step in detail on how to configure your django websocket application on a Ubuntu 20.10 server. This article assumes you are familiar with Django and have a ubuntu remote server running up. To learn more about Django, checkout – Django Tutorial

First, let’s see what all we will be using to put this into production,

1. Nginx – Web and Proxy Server
2. Daphne – our ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface) server which will serve our Django application
3. Redis Backend Server – which will handle our web socket connections (ws://)

Nginx configuration

Install Nginx and Supervisor

$ sudo apt install nginx supervisor

In your /etc/nginx/sites-available/ folder create your server and add the below content, 

upstream redis_backend_server{
server localhost:6379;
}

upstream app_server {
server localhost:9090;
}

server {
listen 80;
listen 443 ssl;
keepalive_timeout 700;

ssl_certificate <path to your cert>;
ssl_certificate_key <path to your key>;

server_name foo.com www.foo.com;
access_log <path to your access logs>;
error_log <path to your error logs>;

add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header Content-Security-Policy "frame-ancestors self https://foo.com";

location /static/ {

root /var/www/staticfiles/;

  }

if ($scheme = http) {
       return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
  }

location / {
       include proxy_params;
       proxy_pass http://app_server;
  }

location /ws {
   proxy_pass http://redis_backend_server;
   proxy_http_version 1.1;
   proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
   proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";


   proxy_ssl_certificate <path to your cert>;
   proxy_ssl_certificate_key <path to your key>;

   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;
   proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto  $scheme;
   }
}

Note – Replace foo with your IP or your domain name.

Now save the configuration and restart Nginx,

$ sudo service nginx reload

Check if the configurations are done correctly as below,

Once that is done, let’ move on to our actual application server.

Daphne Configuration

Install Daphne

$ pip3 install daphne

Test if things are working,

$ daphne -p 8001 project.asgi:application

You should see something similar in your terminal,

Go to <server-ip>:8001 in your browser to check if the application is working.

In the /etc/supervisor/conf.d/ folder create django_server and add the content below,

[fcgi-program:django_server]
# TCP socket used by Nginx backend upstream
socket=tcp://localhost:9090

# Directory where your site's project files are located
directory= <path>

# Each process needs to have a separate socket file, so we use process_num
# Make sure to update "mysite.asgi" to match your project name
command=<path to daphne> -u /run/daphne/daphne%(process_num)d.sock --endpoint fd:fileno=0 --access-log - --proxy-headers project.asgi:application

# Number of processes to startup, roughly the number of CPUs you have
numprocs=1
# Give each process a unique name so they can be told apart
process_name=asgi%(process_num)d

# Automatically start and recover processes
autostart=true
autorestart=true

# Choose where you want your log to go
stdout_logfile=<path to your asgi logs>
redirect_stderr=true

Note – replace project with your project name

once that is done we have to create a dir for our sockets to run,

$ sudo mkdir /run/daphne/

Restart and update the supervisor configurations,

$ sudo supervisorctl reread
$ sudo supervisorctl update

I know it’s a lot to take in, we just have one more step to get our server up and running. So stay with me.

Redis Backend Server Configuration

This is the server that will handle all our web socket connections that the Daphne server forwards.

Install redis server

$ sudo apt install redis-server

Edit the Redis configurations to run as a service with our systemd

$ sudo nano /etc/redis/redis.conf

Change “supervised no” to “supervised systemd”  in the config file

$ sudo systemctl restart redis.service

Check if the server is Active and running

sudo systemctl status redis

You should get the below response

Finally with all in place and running, you should be seeing your application up and running on your server.