Recommended way to setup Django Fast CGI configuration with multiple domains

Question

I'm creating a Django project that will be used by multiple domains, and the functionality will be slightly different depending on the domain. I'm looking for advice on the proper way to set this up.

The sites framework seems like it would be a good fit for doing some of the customizations once processing has reached the point where it's executing the Django code. But I'm trying to determine what the setup should be before we reach that point (relating to the nginx, flup, fastcgi, config).

Here is my current understanding:

It seems like multiple Django settings files are appropriate, each with a different SITE_ID. Then two virtual hosts would be setup in the nginx configuration that would point to two different sockets. Two 'manage.py runfastcgi' processes would then be used to listen on those two different sockets and each process would reference a different settings.py

./manage.py --settings=settings.site1.py runfcgi method=prefork socket=/home/user/mysite1.sock pidfile=django1.pid
./manage.py --settings=settings.site2.py runfcgi method=prefork socket=/home/user/mysite2.sock pidfile=django2.pid

However, it seems like this could get messy if you add more domains. It would require a new 'manage runfastcgi' process to be run for every domain that would be added. Is there a way to support multiple sites in this way without running a separate process for each?

What are your experiences with hosting multiple domains with Django?

Any advice is much appreciated. Thank you for reading.

Joe

Answer 1

If you are going to have a lot of domains running, one process per domain might get quite expensive. The sites framework was originally made with another use case in mind: being able to easily create "duplicate" content on several news sites. When trying to use the sites framework for other uses you run into several difficulties.

one possibility is to move the domain processing to a middleware and have django handle the multidomain part. It's not trivial though, specially if you have to tweak apps to be domain aware, and also urlconfs, templates, etc... A quick google search showed up:

http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1119/

Might help as a starting point.