Deploying Django with mod_wsgi on a server behind proxy

django_proxy.md

Follow the steps for deploying Django with Apache and mod_wsgi.

This means that the WSGIDaemon runs under the user www-data, which is a special linux user for Apache.

If you have to connect to the internet, you need to set the $http_proxy and $https_proxy variables. Set them in your /etc/environment file.

This still doesn't mean that the environment variables are set for the www-data user. You need to set the same in the /etc/apache2/envvars file, which sets the environment variables for the www-data user.

# /etc/apache2/envvars
export http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:3128/
export https_proxy=https://127.0.0.1:3128/

(as a side note, I'm using CNTLM - which is why the 127.0.0.1:3128 proxy settings)

In the django code, in your settings.py, do something like:

# settings.py
PROXIES = {
    'http' : os.environ.get('http_proxy'),
    'https' : os.environ.get('https_proxy'),
    'ftp' : os.environ.get('ftp_proxy'),
    'socks' : os.environ.get('socks_proxy'),
}

# when you want to get a resource from the internet
# using urllib2
opener =  urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.ProxyHandler(settings.PROXIES))
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
url = 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?'
res = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()

# using requests
response = requests.get('https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json', proxies=settings.PROXIES)

The same code works when you run the management server using manage.py runserver, if you have the proxy settings in your environment variable.