Introduction

In the second part of our NGINX Survival Guide, we dive into the practical aspects of using NGINX to serve web applications. This section will guide you through the essential tasks of setting up a basic HTTP server, configuring NGINX to serve content from custom directories, and using it as a reverse proxy to forward requests to backend servers.

NGINX is a versatile web server that can be used to serve applications in a variety of ways, from simple web servers to complex proxy configurations. NGINX can be used to serve static HTML content, proxy requests to a backend server, or load balance traffic across multiple servers. In this guide, we’ll explore the different ways to use NGINX to serve applications, including setting up a simple HTTP server, serving content from custom directories, and using it to load balance traffic across multiple upstream servers.

Introduction

NGINX is a tool that can be used as a web server, reverse proxy, load balancer, streaming media files, application gateway, content caching, and so much more. It can be said to be a Swiss army knife for optimizing and securing your web application deployment.

The series “NGINX Survival Guide” will start from the basics and cover the bare minimum required for a backend developer to get going with NGINX. I will use Docker widely throughout this course as it is a great combination with NGINX to server web applications. However, you can use NGINX without docker, and spawn multiple servers.

Creating a django basic application with configuration for static files, templates and user authentication using docker and debian base image.

Introduction

We have already seen the process of deployment of a Django app on Heroku, now we can move to another platform which is Railway App. This allows a faster and more intuitive way to deploy a Django app(or any sort of web app). This platform has several Starter Apps for shipping your app in several clicks, definitely, it would require some configuration and tweaking a bit.

We will be following similar steps from the Django-Heroku Deployment Guide for configuring and setting up our Django project for the deployment on the Railway app. We explore a few different ways to create and deploy a Django project on Railway.

Introduction

Django projects are quite easy to build and simple to understand, you might have created a Django application and wanted to show it to the world? You can deploy a basic Django application with a database(PostgreSQL) with Heroku. It provides a decent free tier with some great features and add-ons. A free tier Heroku account has a limitation of 5 apps, limited data in the database, limited connections to the server per month, and so on.

Introduction

In the previous section, we configured the database in our Django project. We will move ahead and interact with the Admin Section in Django. Django has a built-in Admin Section which we can use to manage our apps and models. We will create a admin account(superuser) and try to render our custom Model in the Admin Interface. We shall further discuss the customization in the Admin section as per our requirements and necessity.

Introduction

In this part of the series, we will create an external database and configure the settings for that database. We also look into the process of migrations which is to convert a model which we created in the previous part into the actual structure/schema for the database. I’ll be using PostgreSQL for most of the demonstrations but it should be similar for other database management tools. This part will make your Django project link to a local database.

Introduction

We have seen the basics of Django templating in the previous parts of the series. Now, we can move on to the more backend stuff in Django which deals with the Databases, queries, admin section, and so on. In this particular part, we’ll cover the fundamental part of any application in Django i.e the Model. We’ll understand what the model is, how to structure one, how to create relationships and add constraints on the fields, etc.

Introduction

After creating templates, it should be rather tempting to add some styles and logic to them. Well yes, we’ll see how to add static files in a web application using django. Static files are not only CSS, but also media/images and Javascript files as well. In this part of the series, we’ll cover the basics of working with static files in django including the configuration, rendering and storing of the static files.

Introduction

After learning the basics of views and URLs, we can now move on to the next concept i.e. Templates. In Django, Templates are quite an important component for the application as it acts as the frontend for the web application. With the help of templates and some features provided by Django, it becomes very intuitive and simple to make dynamic web content. In this part, we understand what are templates and what is the way to render them.