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I have just bought a dedicated server and they provide me a IP address, access info as root and machive with Centos 5.

I would like to serve my django app in that machine but because I have no experiences such server issues I don't know what is the best way to do that.

I have install mysql, python 2.7.1 and django as root and I think this is reasonable. But I have questions know.

  1. Should I create a new user to deploy application and serve it on paache or doing that as root also ok ?
  2. Should I create a user to manipulate with mysql ?
  3. Django is running with Apache-modwsgi in my local. Should I configure Apache on server to run with mod-wsgi or is there any better method to it ?

I am a newbie on this server issues so please forgive me if my questions are so general to answer.

Any easy-to-read document (beginner-inter level) is also ok for me. I am also really appreciated if you explain your experiences or the best practices to do such configurations.

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 13 '11 at 21:13

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On CentOS Apache runs as the user "apache" and group "apache" by default (provided you installed it from the CentOS-Base repo). –  HTTP500 Jul 13 '11 at 21:25

1 Answer 1

up vote 4 down vote accepted
  1. don't run it as root, it is a safety risk
  2. make a seperate user for mysql that only has the rights it needs, you can even make different ones : (if you only need to read for certain users only give that user read rights)

  3. http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/QuickConfigurationGuide

  4. install a firewall, close everything and open each port you need. I suggest you take a look at "vuurmuur" if you want something simple

for your user you do as root :

  1. adduser someuser
  2. mkdir /var/www/somedir
  3. mkdir /home/someuser/dirwherethesourcecango
  4. ln -s /var/www/somedir /home/someuser/dirwherethesourcecango (symbolic link)
  5. chown -R someuser /var/www/somedir (set the rights so you can write)

Now when you log in as someuser, you can just add files to the dirwherethesourcecango, it is a symbolic link to /var/www/somedir.

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Thanks for your detailed answer but I still have some confusion on users. For example, where should I put the source code of my app ? Because I have just used VPS, there was a public_html folder,symlink to www folder and soon. In this case, should I define a user and make a symlink to /usr/local/www/ from /home/username/ ? Could you illustrate the tree I must have ? –  brsbilgic Jul 13 '11 at 23:29
I'll add it to my answer –  Lucas Kauffman Jul 14 '11 at 4:19

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