Django Channels Nginx production

Question

I have a django project and recently added channels to use websockets. This seems to all work fine, but the problem I have is to get the production ready.

My setup i

Answer 1

This question is actually addressed in the latest Django Channels docs:

It is good practice to use a common path prefix like /ws/ to distinguish WebSocket connections from ordinary HTTP connections because it will make deploying Channels to a production environment in certain configurations easier.

In particular for large sites it will be possible to configure a production-grade HTTP server like nginx to route requests based on path to either (1) a production-grade WSGI server like Gunicorn+Django for ordinary HTTP requests or (2) a production-grade ASGI server like Daphne+Channels for WebSocket requests.

Note that for smaller sites you can use a simpler deployment strategy where Daphne serves all requests - HTTP and WebSocket - rather than having a separate WSGI server. In this deployment configuration no common path prefix like is /ws/ is necessary.

In practice, your NGINX configuration would then look something like (shortened to only include relevant bits):

upstream daphne_server {
  server unix:/var/www/html/env/run/daphne.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

upstream gunicorn_server {
  server unix:/var/www/html/env/run/gunicorn.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

server { 
  listen   80; 
  server_name _;

  location /ws/ {
    proxy_pass http://daphne_server;
  }

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://gunicorn_server;
  }
}

(Above it is assumed that you are binding the Gunicorn and Daphne servers to Unix socket files.)