Django with Mysql and Apache on EC2

by shabda on March 6, 2009

What is EC2

Unless you have been living on Mars these last few years, you are sure to have heard of EC2. Amazon’s cloud offering, it offers infinite scalability. Using EC2, you can bring up any number of machines online at minutes notice, and after you are done with them, bring them down.

How does EC2 work?

A EC2 machine is nothing but a bare machine. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a machine bundled as an Image, with preconfigured software which you can start at moments notice. We will take a AMI with a basic Ubuntu installed, and install Django with Mysql and Apache there.

The prerequisites

You need to have an AWS account with EC2 enabled. We don’t like to use not standard tools from the shell, right? So we will install ElasticFox, a Firefox plugin to enable using AWS services from within Firefox.

Give ElasticFox your EC2 credentials. Launch ElasticFox and lunch an AMI. This is covered in extreme detail in ElasticFox owners manual so we will not cover that here.

I started the AMI with AMI id ami-f27c999b. This is a 64 bit Ubuntu Gutsy AMI.

After you start your ami, right click in ElasticFox on your instance and get its Public DNS. This will allow you to ssh to the instance. But you don’t have the root password for it, eh? When you launched your AMI, you used a keypair, right? So you can ssh to your server using your private key.

My public dns was ec2-75-101-203-97.compute-1.amazonaws.com, my private key is stored in a file called id-django. So i login as,

shabda@shabda-laptop:~$ ssh -i id-django root@ec2-75-101-203-97.compute-1.amazonaws.com


..........

root@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~#

Fine, we are in our brand new EC2 server now! Ok, we do not want to work as root, create a new user and give sudo rights to it.

root@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~# adduser shabda
Adding user `shabda' ...
Adding new group `shabda' (1000) ...
Adding new user `shabda' (1000) with group `shabda' ...
Creating home directory `/home/shabda' ...
Copying files from `/etc/skel' ...
Enter new UNIX password: 
Retype new UNIX password: 
passwd: password updated successfully
Changing the user information for shabda
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
    Full Name []: 
    Room Number []: 
    Work Phone []: 
    Home Phone []: 
    Other []: 
Is the information correct? [y/N] y
root@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~# visudo

Ok, so we created a new user and gave the new user shabda sudo rights. Logout and login as shabda.

shabda@shabda-laptop:~$ ssh shabda@ec2-75-101-203-97.compute-1.amazonaws.com
shabda@ec2-75-101-203-97.compute-1.amazonaws.com's password: 

...
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$

Ok we are logged in as shabda. Let us install mysql, apache, mod_python, django and associated libraries.

shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ sudo apt-get install apache2
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-python
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ wget http://www.djangoproject.com/download/1.0.2/tarball/
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ tar -xvzf Django-1.0.2-final.tzf
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ cd Django-1.0.2-final/
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ sudo python setup.py install

Fine, seems like we are done. Lets start a python interpretor and see id we can import Django

shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~/Django-1.0.2-final$ python
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Apr  8 2008, 21:47:16) 
[GCC 4.2.3 (Ubuntu 4.2.3-2ubuntu7)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
&gt;&gt;&gt; import django
&gt;&gt;&gt; 
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ django-admin.py startproject testproject
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ cd testproject
shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~/testproject$ python manage.py validate
0 errors found

Ok we have django running. Lets checkout something , so apt-get subversion.

shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ sudo apt-get install subversion

Ok we can run our site on the dev server, lets configure Apache to serve our content.

shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ sudo vim /etc/apache2/httpd.conf 

<location>
    SetHandler python-program
    PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
    SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE settings
    PythonOption django.root
    PythonDebug On
    PythonPath "['/home/shabda/testproject', '/var'] + sys.path"
</location>

Alias /media /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media
<location media="">
    SetHandler None
</location>

Alias /static /var/www_django/static
<location static="">
    SetHandler None
</location>

Check ec2-75-101-203-97.compute-1.amazonaws.com, you get a “Congratulations on your first Django-powered page.” page

Lets create a database now.

shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ mysql -u root -p

mysql&gt; create database djangotest;

mysql&gt; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'shabda8'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'some_pass' WITH GRANT OPTION;

shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~/testproject$ mysql -u shabda8 -p
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 17
Server version: 5.0.51a-3ubuntu5 (Ubuntu)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql&gt;

Ok we have a database. Lets checkout a reusable django app in our project directory.

shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ svn co  https://svn.uswaretech.com/djikiki/trunk/djikiki/ djikiki

Edit the settings.py and add database setting and this app to installed apps

shabda@domU-12-31-39-02-BC-E1:~$ python manage.py validate

Oh and we are done. Navigate to the public url of your instance and you should see your site. Play around with it.

Hmm, we want to test how well does our site perform. We are going to use the awesome benchmarking tool called ab. ab is Apache Benchmark tool, it comes installed with Apache Httpd server. However to benchmark we need to bring up another instance, as running the server and benchmarking tool on same server gives wrong result.

Ok so we bring up another server, login and run the ab tool. Here is the ouput.

root@domU-12-31-39-03-40-97:~# ab -n 5000 -c 70 http://ec2-75-101-203-97.compute-1.amazonaws.com/djikiki/page/A-title/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 &lt;$Revision: 655654 $&gt;
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking ec2-75-101-203-97.compute-1.amazonaws.com (be patient)
Completed 500 requests
Completed 1000 requests
Completed 1500 requests
Completed 2000 requests
Completed 2500 requests
Completed 3000 requests
Completed 3500 requests
Completed 4000 requests
Completed 4500 requests
Completed 5000 requests
Finished 5000 requests


Server Software:        Apache/2.2.8
Server Hostname:        ec2-75-101-203-97.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /djikiki/page/A-title/
Document Length:        2703 bytes

Concurrency Level:      70
Time taken for tests:   32.344 seconds
Complete requests:      5000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      14465000 bytes
HTML transferred:       13515000 bytes
Requests per second:    154.59 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       452.814 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       6.469 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          436.74 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
          min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    5   6.5      1      61
Processing:    22  446 228.9    421    2356
Waiting:       22  444 228.6    419    2356
Total:         23  450 229.3    426    2356

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    426
  66%    524
  75%    588
  80%    631
  90%    740
  95%    833
  98%    935
  99%   1026
 100%   2356 (longest request)

150+ requests per second. (This page does about 10 database queries). Not bad for an unoptimized server with even DEBUG = True, eh?

We still have a lot to do to make this server production ready. If you bring down this instance, all you data is lost. So you need to get an EBS volume and attach it to your instance. You also want to backup your data on S2. But more about those in another post.

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