Serving with the Pound reverse Proxy and the Waitress WSGI web server

The instructions here describe how Pound and Waitress can be used to serve your application whenever your debian-based server is powered up.

They assume you have no other web server running (so port 80 and port 8000 is free), and you are familiar with shell commands, changing directories, creating text files and setting permissions. You should also have used skipole to create an application.

In this example Pound proxies calls to the Waitress web server which is running your wsgi python application. The settings here use default values provided by the operating system to keep the setup simple.

Install the packages 'pound' and 'python3-waitress'

apt-get install pound

apt-get install python3-waitress

Assuming your project is called 'myproj'.

Copy the projectfiles directory into /opt, creating directory:

/opt/projectfiles/

Ensure skilift, skiadmin and the development server are removed and myproj.py is edited with the following:

    from waitress import serve
    serve(application, host='127.0.0.1', port=8000)

Give the directory and contents www-data:www-data ownership

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /opt/projectfiles

Then create a file :

/lib/systemd/system/myproj.service

containing the following:

    [Unit]
    Description=My project description
    After=multi-user.target

    [Service]
    Type=idle
    ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /opt/projectfiles/myproj.py

    User=www-data

    Restart=on-failure

    # Connects standard output to /dev/null
    StandardOutput=null

    # Connects standard error to journal
    StandardError=journal

    [Install]
    WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then set permissions of the file

sudo chown root:root /lib/systemd/system/myproj.service

sudo chmod 644 /lib/systemd/system/myproj.service

Enable the service

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl enable myproj.service

This starts /opt/projectfiles/myproj.py on boot up.

edit the pound cfg file at /etc/pound/pound.cfg to read:

    
    
    ## Minimal sample pound.cfg
    ##
    ## see pound(8) for details
    
    
    ######################################################################
    ## global options:
    
    User		"www-data"
    Group		"www-data"
    #RootJail	"/chroot/pound"
    
    ## Logging: (goes to syslog by default)
    ##	0	no logging
    ##	1	normal
    ##	2	extended
    ##	3	Apache-style (common log format)
    LogLevel	1
    
    ## check backend every X secs:
    Alive		30
    
    ## use hardware-accelleration card supported by openssl(1):
    #SSLEngine	""
    
    # poundctl control socket
    Control "/var/run/pound/poundctl.socket"
    
    
    ######################################################################
    ## listen, redirect and ... to:
    
    ## redirect all requests on port 8080 ("ListenHTTP") to the local webserver (see "Service" below):
    ListenHTTP
    	Address 192.168.122.3
    	Port	80
    
    	## allow PUT and DELETE also (by default only GET, POST and HEAD)?:
    	xHTTP		1
    
    	Service
    		BackEnd
    			Address	127.0.0.1
    			Port	8000
    		End
    	End
    End

The changes from default are - listen is port 80, backend is port 8000 and ip address is whatever is required (in my test case it was 192.168.122.3)

Enable pound to start by editing /etc/default/pound

and setting

startup=1

Finally reboot - note: as pound may start before the project, give the server a minute before testing.

The configuration is given here as a basis which could be expanded - to multiple backend services in a load balancing application perhaps.