Install Django on your POWER web hosting plan

Last updated 5th January 2023

Objective

You've subscribed to a Web POWER web hosting plan to deploy Python applications, and you want to deploy Django on it.

This guide will explain how to do it.

Find out how to install Django on your POWER web hosting plan.

Requirements

• A Node.js POWER web hosting plan
• access to the OVHcloud Control Panel

If you have just started to use your Web POWER web hosting plan, we suggest to have a look at our Getting started with a POWER web hosting plan guide before going further.

Instructions

Let's suppose you have the default configuration for Python hosting:

• Runtime: Python 3.8
• Entrypoint: app.py
• DocumentRoot: www

To use Python WSGI frameworks, using virtualenv is the simplest choice.

Connect via SSH to your POWER web hosting and activate virtualenv:

~$ cd www
~/www$ virtualenv venv
~/www$ source venv/bin/activate

Update pip:

~/www$ pip install --upgrade pip

Install Django:

~/www$ pip install django

Create the new Django project:

~/www$ django-admin startproject config

By default, Django's wsgi application is located in config/wsgi.py. As our configured hosting entrypoint is app.py, we can create the following symlink:

~/www$ ln -s config/wsgi.py app.py

As Django is installed inside a virtualenv, we should tell the app to use it. We can do so by adding these 2 lines in app.py before Django import:

this_file = "venv/bin/activate_this.py"
exec(open(this_file).read(), {'__file__': this_file})

The complete app.py file:

"""
WSGI config for config project.

It exposes the WSGI callable as a module-level variable named ``application``.

For more information on this file, see
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/howto/deployment/wsgi/
"""

import os

this_file = "venv/bin/activate_this.py"
exec(open(this_file).read(), {'__file__': this_file})

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application

os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'config.settings')

application = get_wsgi_application()

Django needs to declare the allowed hosts used for the website. It's configured in config/settings.py, for example:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['yourdomainname', 'www.yourdomainname', 'yourFTPuser.cluster022.hosting.ovh.net']

Then restart your instance and your Django will be online.

Terminal output:

~ $ cd www

~/www $ virtualenv venv
created virtual environment CPython3.8.7.final.0-64 in 1273ms
  creator CPython3Posix(dest=/home/powerlp/www/venv, clear=False, global=False)
  seeder FromAppData(download=False, pip=bundle, setuptools=bundle, wheel=bundle, via=copy, app_data_dir=/home/powerlp/.local/share/virtualenv)
    added seed packages: pip==20.2.2, setuptools==49.6.0, wheel==0.35.1
  activators BashActivator,CShellActivator,FishActivator,PowerShellActivator,PythonActivator,XonshActivator

~/www $ source venv/bin/activate

~/www $ pip install --upgrade pip
Collecting pip
  Using cached pip-21.0.1-py3-none-any.whl (1.5 MB)
Installing collected packages: pip
  Attempting uninstall: pip
    Found existing installation: pip 20.2.2
    Uninstalling pip-20.2.2:
      Successfully uninstalled pip-20.2.2
Successfully installed pip-21.0.1

~/www $ pip install django
Collecting django
  Downloading Django-3.1.6-py3-none-any.whl (7.8 MB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 7.8 MB 13.0 MB/s
Collecting pytz
  Downloading pytz-2021.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (510 kB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 510 kB 65.6 MB/s
Collecting asgiref<4,>=3.2.10
  Downloading asgiref-3.3.1-py3-none-any.whl (19 kB)
Collecting sqlparse>=0.2.2
  Downloading sqlparse-0.4.1-py3-none-any.whl (42 kB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 42 kB 1.2 MB/s
Installing collected packages: sqlparse, pytz, asgiref, django
Successfully installed asgiref-3.3.1 django-3.1.6 pytz-2021.1 sqlparse-0.4.1

~/www $ django-admin startproject config .

~/www $ ln -s config/wsgi.py app.py

~/www $ cat app.py
"""
WSGI config for config project.

It exposes the WSGI callable as a module-level variable named ``application``.

For more information on this file, see
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/howto/deployment/wsgi/
"""

import os

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application

os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'config.settings')

application = get_wsgi_application()

~/www $ cat config/settings.py
"""
Django settings for config project.

Generated by 'django-admin startproject' using Django 3.1.6.

For more information on this file, see
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/topics/settings/

For the full list of settings and their values, see
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/ref/settings/
"""

from pathlib import Path

# Build paths inside the project like this: BASE_DIR / 'subdir'.
BASE_DIR = Path(__file__).resolve().parent.parent


# Quick-start development settings - unsuitable for production
# See https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/howto/deployment/checklist/

# SECURITY WARNING: keep the secret key used in production secret!
SECRET_KEY = '83sh7zk*@1w#z3&oa;@%5b-@iejc_4tl5))@niu1u882k*8h7kp'

# SECURITY WARNING: don't run with debug turned on in production!
DEBUG = True

ALLOWED_HOSTS = [ 'power.lostinbrittany.dev', 'xxxx.xxxx.hosting.ovh.net' ]

[...]


~/www $ mkdir -p tmp

~/www $ touch tmp/restart.txt

More information on Django

To get more information on Django, go to the official documentation site.

Go further

Join our community of users on https://community.ovh.com/en/.

Join our Gitter room to discuss directly with the POWER Web Hosting team and the other users of this lab.

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