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Showing posts from December, 2015

Automatic Maintenance Page for Nginx+Django app

If you've used Django with Nginx, you are probably familiar with how to configure the Nginx process group to reverse proxy to a second Gunicorn or uWSGI Django process group.  (The proxy_pass Nginx parameter passes traffic through Nginx to Django.) One benefit of this approach is that if your Django process crashes or if you are preforming an upgrade and take Django offline, Nginx can still be available to serve static content and offer some sort of "the system is down" message to users.  With just a few lines of configuration, Nginx can be set to automatically display a splash page in the above scenarios. If the Django process running behind the reverse proxy becomes unavailable, a 502 error will be emitted by Nginx.  By default, that 502 will be returned to the browser as an ugly error message.  However, Nginx can be configured to catch that 502 error and respond with custom behavior.  Specifically, if a 502 is raised by Nginx, Nginx can check for a custom html erro