How To Set Up Django with Postgres, Nginx, and Gunicorn on Ubuntu 16.04

In this tutorial, we will walk through the steps of setting up a Django web application with Postgres as the database, Nginx as the web server, and Gunicorn as the application server on an Ubuntu 16.04 server.

Step 1: Install Required Packages

Before we begin, we need to install some packages:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev libpq-dev postgresql postgresql-contrib nginx

Step 2: Set Up Postgres Database

Next, we need to create a database for our Django application:

sudo -u postgres psql CREATE DATABASE myproject; CREATE USER myprojectuser WITH PASSWORD 'mypassword'; ALTER ROLE myprojectuser SET client_encoding TO 'utf8'; ALTER ROLE myprojectuser SET default_transaction_isolation TO 'read committed'; ALTER ROLE myprojectuser SET timezone TO 'UTC'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE myproject TO myprojectuser;

Step 3: Create a Python Virtual Environment

We will create a Python virtual environment for our Django project to isolate it from the system Python:

sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv mkdir ~/myproject cd ~/myproject virtualenv myprojectenv source myprojectenv/bin/activate

Step 4: Install Django and Gunicorn

With our virtual environment active, we can install Django and Gunicorn:

pip install django gunicorn psycopg2

Step 5: Create a Django Project

Now we can create a Django project:

django-admin startproject myproject ~/myproject

Step 6: Configure Django

We need to configure Django to use Postgres as the database:

nano ~/myproject/myproject/settings.py

Update the DATABASES setting:

DATABASES = { 'default': { 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql', 'NAME': 'myproject', 'USER': 'myprojectuser', 'PASSWORD': 'mypassword', 'HOST': 'localhost', 'PORT': '', } }

Step 7: Migrate the Database

We need to create the database tables:

python ~/myproject/manage.py makemigrations python ~/myproject/manage.py migrate

Step 8: Test the Django Development Server