Serving Django via CherryPy behind cherokee

Almost one year ago "Peter Baumgartner" wrote about Serving Django via cherrypy I am going to explain in this post how to take this approach one step further and to add load and balancing of the requests to several instances of cherrypy. This sounds like a lot of "*.conf" editing, isn't it ? In fact the nice thing about this approach is that the only file you will have to edit is your settings.py to add one line. To do so I am going to use cherokee mainly because it has a user friendly interface called cherokee-admin which provides a very easy way to configure your server. For this article I have used cherokee Version 0.98.1.

I will assume in this article that you have a working django project in a virtualenv. First you will need to install cherrypy and django-cpserver. You have several way to do this the easier is probably to use pip

pip install cherrypy
pip install -e git://github.com/lincolnloop/django-cpserver.git#egg=django-cpserver

Then you need to edit you settings.py to add "django_cpserver" in the list of your INSTALLED_APPS. This will give you a convenient django management command to start cherrypy server.
./manage.py runcpserver port=8089

Believe it or not this was the hardest part of the recipe from now to the end we will use a nice web interface. In order to launch cherokee-admin on ubuntu I use the following command :

sudo cherokee-admin

We need to define 2 remote sources in the admin interface :

127.0.0.1:8088 and 127.0.0.1:8088 are the addresses on which cherokee can contact the cherrypy instances. Several interested things to note here, the adresses can be spread on several computer and several ports.

Then we need to define a new target "/django" (alias) that will load and balance the requests to cherrypy instances.



Then for this target we need to set the handler to "HTTP reverse proxy".


It is time to use the remote sources we have defined earlier.



The last bit is to rewrite the url before passing it to the cherrypy instances



This is the end of the recipe you can now save the modification and restart the cherokee. I would be glad to read from you the enhancements that could be added to this recipe.