Steps to Deploy Django App to AWS EC2

In this blog, I use the AWS Ubuntu 22.04 instance as a Hosting platform and used an Apache2 server with mod_wsgi for configurations.

Step 1. Run these below cmd's to get the latest updates.

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

$ sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip

$ sudo python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip

Step2. Now let's make a new directory for our project.

$ mkdir /var/www

Move into the directory:

$ cd /var/www

Step 3. Now, Create a quick project or Import or clone an existing django project.

I will prefer to create a small project and then import or clone your existing project to make sure other things are working as expected.

Check that the Python is installed 

$ python3 --version

$ sudo python3 -m pip install django

or 

$ sudo python3 -m pip install django==2.2

Check the Django version.

$ python3 -m django --version

Create a project using django admin.

$ sudo django-admin startproject mysite

Change directory into that project:

$ cd mysite/

Create an app using manage.py. 

$ sudo python3 manage.py startapp website

Migrate the changes to create db instances.

$ sudo python3 manage.py migrate

If you face any issue in migration run the below cmd:

$ sudo python3 manage.py migrate --run-syncdb

Run the django server.

$ sudo python3 manage.py runserver

Step 4. Now install apache2 and mod_wsgi for Python3.

Now let's setup the apache config file for our website:

Configuration:

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerName neptuneworld.in

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/mysite-error.log 
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/mysite-access.log combined

WSGIDaemonProcess mysite processes=2 threads=25 python-path=/var/www/mysite 
WSGIProcessGroup mysite

WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/mysite/mysite/wsgi.py 
Alias /robots.txt /var/www/mysite/static/robots.txt
Alias /favicon.ico /var/www/mysite/static/favicon.ico
Alias /static/ /var/www/mysite/static/
Alias /media/ /var/www/mysite/media/

<Directory /var/www/mysite/mysite>
     <Files wsgi.py> 
	      Require all granted
	 </Files> 
</Directory>

<Directory /var/www/mysite/static> 
   Require all granted 
</Directory>

<Directory /var/www/mysite/media>
    Require all granted
</Directory> 

<Directory /var/www/mysite>
        WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
</Directory>

</VirtualHost>

ServerName, WSGIProcessGroup and also change Directory as per the project.

Remove the default site if you wish to remove it.

$ sudo rm /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

Now enable our new site “mysite.conf” and reload the Apache server.

$ sudo a2ensite mysite

$ sudo systemctl reload apache2

Check the status using below cmd.

$ sudo systemctl status apache2.service

Finally, we can try the url or IP that we configured in “mysite.conf” in ServerName. 

Example: ServerName neptuneworld.in.

But we find that we can't access the Images and not able to login to application because our database is read-only for our user.

In this case, using apache, our "user" is www-data. We need to give this user permission to edit these files for us. 

$ cd /var/www/

$ sudo chown www-data mysite/

$ sudo chown www-data mysite/db.sqlite3

$ sudo chown www-data mysite/*

$ sudo chown www-data mysite/media/*

$ sudo chown www-data mysite/static/*

$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/mysite

To check the owner or user permission

$ sudo ls -ld /var/www/mysite

Then reload server:

$ sudo service apache2 reload 

or

$ sudo systemctl reload apache2

You can check the users using:

$ ls -l

You can check the status of your apache server:

$ sudo systemctl status apache2.service

To start or stop apache service use below cmds:

$sudo systemctl start apache2.service

$sudo systemctl stop apache2.service

After successful run now you can import your existing project.

$ sudo git clone https://github.com/Neptune998/repository.git

Then install all the required applications like:

$ sudo pip install django-taggit==1.3.0

$ sudo pip install django-crispy-forms==1.10.0

$ sudo pip install django-summernote==0.8.11.6

$ sudo apt install Pillow==8.1.0

Run this cmd to get all the static files in a path that you configured in settings.py so that django can use them.

$ sudo python3 manage.py collectstatic

To check the logs use below cmds:

$ cd /var/log/apache2

Move to the directory or directly access using below nano cmd:

$ sudo nano /var/log/apache2/mysite-error.log

$ sudo nano /var/log/apache2/mysite-access.log

Thanks for Reading !!!