Apache and mod_wsgi

In production, you should create a dedicated user for RDMO. All steps for the installation, which do not need root access, should be done using this user. As before, we assume this user is called rdmo and it’s home is /srv/rdmo and therefore your rdmo-app is located in /srv/rdmo/rdmo-app.

Install the Apache server and mod_wsgi on Debian or Ubuntu using:

sudo apt install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3

Next, create a virtual host configuration. Unfortunately, the different distributions use different versions of Apache and mod_wsgi and therefore require a slightly different setup:

For Debian/Ubuntu in /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf use (other distributions might use a slightly different setup):

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

    Alias /static /srv/rdmo/rdmo-app/static_root/
    <Directory /srv/rdmo/rdmo-app/static_root/>
        Require all granted
    </Directory>

    WSGIDaemonProcess rdmo user=rdmo group=rdmo \
        home=/srv/rdmo/rdmo-app python-home=/srv/rdmo/rdmo-app/env
    WSGIProcessGroup rdmo
    WSGIScriptAlias / /srv/rdmo/rdmo-app/config/wsgi.py process-group=rdmo
    WSGIPassAuthorization On

    <Directory /srv/rdmo/rdmo-app/config/>
        <Files wsgi.py>
            Require all granted
        </Files>
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Restart the Apache server: sudo service apache2 restart. RDMO should now be available on YOURDOMAIN. Note that the Apache user needs to have access to /srv/rdmo/rdmo-app/static_root/.

As you can see from the virtual host configurations, the static assets such as CSS and JavaScript files are served independently from the WSGI-python script. In order to do so, they need to be gathered in the static_root directory. This can be achieved by running:

python manage.py collectstatic --clear

in your virtual environment (--clear removes existing files before collecting).

In order to apply changes to the RDMO code (e.g. after an upgrade), the webserver needs to be reloaded or the config/wsgi.py file needs to appear modified. This can be done using the touch command:

touch config/wsgi.py

Also, the collectstatic command has to be executed again. Both can be achieved by using

python manage.py deploy

in your virtual environment.