django-zappa 0.11.1

A Note About Databases

Since Zappa requirements are called from a bundled version of your local environment and not from pip, and because we have no way to determine what platform our Zappa handler will be executing on, we need to make sure that we only use portable packages. So, instead of using the default MySQL engine, we will instead need to use mysql-python-connector.

That means your app’s settings file will need an entry that looks like something this (notice the Engine field):

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'mysql.connector.django',
        'NAME': 'your_db_name',
        'USER': 'your_db_username',
        'PASSWORD': 'your_db_password',
        'HOST': 'your_db_name.your_db_id.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com',
        'PORT': '3306',
    }
}

At time of writing, there seems to be a problem with the Python MySQL connector when calling the initial ‘migrate’. You can remedy this by using the usual ‘django.db.backends.mysql’ for your initial migration from your local machine and just using ‘mysql.connector.django’ in your remote settings.

Currently, Zappa only supports MySQL and Aurora on RDS.

Middleware

Zappa requires special middleware for handling cookies, so in your remote settings file, you must include ZappaMiddleware as the first item in your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'django_zappa.middleware.ZappaMiddleware',
    ...
)

Initial Deployments

Once your settings are configured, you can package and deploy your Django application to an environment called ‘production’ with a single command:

$ python manage.py deploy production
Deploying..
Your application is now live at: https://7k6anj0k99.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/production

And now your app is live! How cool is that?!

Updates

If your application has already been deployed and you only need to upload new Python code, but not touch the underlying routes, you can simply:

$ python manage.py update production
Updating..
Your application is now live at: https://7k6anj0k99.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/production

Management

If you want to invoke Django management commands on the remote Zappa instance, you simply call the ‘invoke’ management command locally:

$ python manage.py invoke production check
System check identified no issues (0 silenced).

Tailing Logs

You can watch the logs of a deployment by calling the ‘tail’ management command.

$ python manage.py tail production

Let’s Encrypt SSL

Zappa has very basic support for Let’s Encrypt, but not automatic certificate updating.

There is also a bootstrapping problem here, as the ACME server will need to access your domain in order to verify that you own it, so you will have to create an initial self-signed certificate when you first configure a domain for use with API Gateway.

Then, you can generate your Let’s Encrypt challenge information using a local client or a service like GetHTTPSForFree.com.

Next, in your remote settings file, define the following entries (change these values, obviously):

LETS_ENCRYPT_CHALLENGE_PATH = "KkI_AMwzmQxlMDtaitt7eZMWEDn0t0Fsl5HjkJSPxyz"
LETS_ENCRYPT_CHALLENGE_CONTENT = "KkI_AMwzmQxlMDtaitt7eZMWEDn0t0Fsl5HjkJSPxyz.ABC5hET2fxMsBLCsQLlAVA5MLvYUnX8gEAYaXN0xI4Y"

Then, continue with the process and you should receive a valid Let’s Encrypt Certificate for your domain. Nice!

(When creating scheduled Lambda events via API is possible, this whole process may be wrapped into the ‘deploy’ command. Until then, you’re kind of on your own.)