Snawar Hussain

PhD fellow at Zhejiang University
majoring in Computer Science
Research Areas: Machine Vision, Computational Ethology, BCI

8 minute read

There are a lot of tutorials out there about setting up Django with mod_wsgi and apache. however, most of them are outdated or incomplete. none of them tells how to exactly configure the whole set up when I tried to configure Django with apache I had to read a lot of documentation and look through a lot of forums to piece together all the information. therefore, I decided to make this tutorial for the latest apache2 and Django 3.2.5.

we gonna walk through each step in the procedure in a systematic way setting up the whole thing and this tutorial includes serving the admin panel files from Django with apache2 as well.

installing apache2

install apache2 and apache2-dev package with apt-get

sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-dev

now just to make sure apache2 is installed correctly and it’s service is running with

sudo systemctl status apache2

you will get something like this…

apache_status

if the service is not running you can start it with

sudo systemctl start apache2

now if the apache2 service is running we can go to the localhost https://127.0.0.1 it will show the default apache2 page with a prompt It works!. we have apache2 installed now

apache welcome

The next step is to install django3

installing Django3.2.5

for that, it is highly recommended to use that we use a python virtual environment. refer to the python virtual environment post if you need any help make a virtual environment for Django with conda or virtual_env with conda:

conda create --name django3 python=3.8

then activate the environment and install Django with either conda or pip during the time of the post django3.2.5 isn’t available on conda channels so i installed it with pip (pip is another package manager like conda)

pip install django==3.2.5

you can do type django-admin version to check to confirm django’s installation.

making a simple django app

make a new Django project in home directory ~/ using:

django-admin startproject mysite

Notice: It is important that you start the new project in the home directory rather than some directory in root i.e. /var/www/ because django-admin need the read-write access. you might run into error if you try to start a project in var/www/. or you can give the read write from root to another user like yourself or www-data : www-data in apache2 case with command sudo chown -R group:user

if you list the directories, there’s gonna be a new dir called mysite the structure of a Django project looks like this

mysite/
    manage.py
    mysite/
        __init__.py
        settings.py
        urls.py
        asgi.py
        wsgi.p

make migrations for database

python manage.py makemigrations

and migrate

python manage.py migrate

create a superuser to access the admin panel of django and go through the generic prompts

python manage.py createsuperuser

now you can start django’s built-in server to see if everything’s working fine

python manage.py runserver

and go to the default http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and you’ll get the install worked successfully page.

django welcome

you can access the admin panel by appending admin/ to the rest of the url like http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin and log in with the username and password you created.

django admin

Press Ctrl+C to stop the server from the terminal

now we want apache to server the same page with admin panel included using mod_wsgi

install mod_wsgi

for installation of the mod_wsgi we will follow this documentation

install the mod_wsgi with pip

pip install mod_wsgi

now to check the installation of mod_wsgi use

mod_wsgi-express start-server

and go to the http://127.0.0.1:8000/ it will show you the mod_wsgi whiskey page (idk why though).

now to use mod_wsgi with Django we need to add mod_wsgi into INSTALLED APPLICATIONS.

open the settings.py with any editor like vim in terminal from home/mysite (~/mysite) directory

sudo vim mysite/settings.py

and add the mod_wsgi.server at the end of INSTALLED_APPS and save the file.

settings.py

now run django with apache and mod_wsgi with

python manage.py runmodwsgi

it will show you something like this in the terminal:

and if you go to the http://127.0.0.1:8000/ you will see that same Django welcome page but this time its being served with apache2 and mod_wsgi if we go to the admin panel of the site with url http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ you will see that there is no styling because we are missing static files for it. we need to add static_root directory and then collect static open setting.py again

sudo vim mysite/settings.py

and search for line STATIC_URL = '/static/' and underneath it add this line:

STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static')

django welcome

NOTE: make sure to import os in the beginning of settings.py if its already not imported

close the file and run

python manage.py collectstatic

to collect the static files in the static folder of the root directory of the project. and then run server again with

python manage.py runmodwsgi

and this time if you go to the admin panel of the site you should be able to see the styling applied.

If there are any typos or missing links, let me know.

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