Hosting a Django Application on AWS | EC2
Follow this simple guide which will help you host a Django Application on EC2 while using EFS for storage.
LAUNCHING AN EC2 INSTANCE
1. Using the Amazon console, choose to the EC2 service.
2. Click on Launch Instance and choose the desired instance type. (Amazon Linux 2 AMI, t2.micro)
3. In the security group section, allow SSH requests so that the instance can be accessed via SSH over the internet and also allow HTTPS requests so that the hosted website can be accessed from the URL.
CONNECTING TO AN EC2 INSTANCE USING SSH
1. A user must have the private SSH key file (.pem) for that instance stored on their system.
2. Make a note of the public IP address of the instance and the username (default: ec2-user)
3. In your terminal (or SSH client terminal), type in the following command with the respective values
$ ssh -i /path/key-pair.pem instance-user-name@instance-public-dns-name
4. You should now be connected to your EC2 instance.
CREATING AN EFS VOLUME
1. Using the Amazon console, choose to the EFS service.
2. Click on Create File System and configure the same as per your needs.
3. Make sure that the EFS is provisioned in the same region and subnet as your EC2 instance.
4. Set up a security group for your EFS such that it allows to your EC2 instance.
MOUNTING EFS
1. Make sure that the mount target state of your EFS is “Available” in the same subnet as your EC2 instance.
2. Run the following command to install the amazon-efs-utils package
$ sudo yum install -y amazon-efs-utils
3. Create a directory onto which you want to attach your EFS.
$ mkdir AppEFS
4. Click on the Attach button of your EFS and use the EFS mount helper command
$ sudo mount -t efs -o tls efs-id:/ AppEFS/
5. Your EFS should be now mounted onto the ‘AppEFS’ directory.
HOSTING AN APPLICATION
1. Enter your EFS directory
$ cd AppEFS
2. We will need to clone the Django Application repository which is to be hosted.
$ sudo yum install gitgit clone repository-link
3. Enter the project directory and install the required dependencies (generally given in the requirements.txt file)
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
4. Open the setting.py file of the project and add the EC2 public IP and DNS to the Allowed Hosts.
$ sudo vim project-folder/settings.py
-- ALLOWED_HOSTS=[‘public-ip’,’public-DNS’,]
5. Run the Django Application Server on the 8000 port
$ python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
NOTE: To have the server running even after the console is closed, use nohup (no hang up)
$ nohup python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
TESTING
1. To test the application, open a browser and append :8000 to the public IP of the EC2 instance.
http://public-ip:8000
2. Django built in server only supports HTTP requests. So make sure you make a HTTP request and not a HTTPS request.
NOTE: You might have to give read-write permissions to your user for the project directory for proper working of your application.
$ chown user-name project-directory
Django Project GitHub Repository: https://github.com/cmn22/commerce-auc...
Documented Steps: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=ht...
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - Intro
00:12 - Launching an EC2 Instance
02:00 - Remote Connection to EC2
02:43 - Creating an EFS Volume
05:14 - Mounting EFS onto a Directory
06:21 - Hosting Django Application
08:41 - Testing
This project has been made by Chaitanya Malani.