Deploy the Imager app to AWS

Deploy your imager application to AWS, using manual means. You should seriously consider reading this blog post first and making sense of it.

Tasks

Here are the things you must incorporate to get it all working:

• Create an EC2 instance
• Install and configure nginx to proxy to Django, and to serve static and media files without proxying these requests to Django.
• Set up gunicorn or waitress serving your Django app as an upstart process (see the gunicorn deployment docs for examples of how to do this).
  • Install GUnicorn or some equivalent wsgi server
  • Install your application code
  • Create an upstart conf file that includes required system environment variables to get everything working correctly.
• Create an RDS instance and connect to it from Django.
• Use a gmail account to send email. Be very careful about setting up an appropriate setting for DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL. If this is not set to the address that belongs to the gmail account (or an alias registered with the account) google will refuse to send the email.

For a basic walkthrough of this process, see this lecture. You may wish to add dj-database-url and django-configurations to your setup to simplify the job of using environment variables to manage sensitive configuration.

You will absolutely want to read the Django Deployment Checklist in order to get your Django configuration squared away for public deployment.

Please read this blog post for another approach to controlling settings across environments (an alternative to django-configurations).

Submitting Your Work

When you have the deployment working, and I can register myself for the site and upload some pictures, submit the URL for your running site.