This article is mainly of interest to web developers who might want to publish a site built with the Django web framework in a lightweight fashion (without involving Apache).

First, let me enumerate the stack that is serving this page to you right now.

1. Hosting: VPS Hosting from ARP Networks
2. Operating System: Ubuntu Server Edition 10.04
3. Reverse proxy server (and file server): Nginx
4. Web server: Tornado
5. Web framework: Django
6. Database: MySQL

Here is my Tornado script which I partially plagiarized from somewhere:

#! /usr/bin/env python

import os
import tornado.httpserver
import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.wsgi
import sys
import django.core.handlers.wsgi
sys.path.append('/some/folder/here/myapp')

def main():
    os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'settings'
    application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()
    container = tornado.wsgi.WSGIContainer(application)
    http_server = tornado.httpserver.HTTPServer(container)
    http_server.listen(8001, "127.0.0.1")
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

I'm serving up this script with Supervisor by creating a script in /etc/supervisor/conf.d/ called myapp.conf and it looks like this:

[program:myapp]
command=/some/folder/here/scripts/mytornadoscript.py

This is the nginx config:

server {
    listen    80;
    server_name deliciousrobots.com;
    rewrite    ^ http://blog.deliciousrobots.com$request_uri?;
}
server {
        listen       80;
    
        server_name blog.deliciousrobots.com;
        root /some/folder/here;

    	location / {
            proxy_pass      http://127.0.0.1:8001;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        }

        location /static/ {
            expires 30d;
        }

        location /wp-content/ {
            expires 30d;
        }

        location /media/ {
            root /usr/share/pyshared/django/contrib/admin;
        }
}

I needed the wp-content from my old wordpress blog because of some image I had uploaded. That's it!