django-zappa 0.9.6

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).

Keeping the server warm

Lambda has a limitation that functions which aren’t called very often take longer to start - sometimes up to ten seconds. However, functions that are called regularly are cached and start quickly, usually in less than 50ms. To ensure that your servers are kept in a cached state, you can manually configure a scheduled task for your Zappa function that’ll keep the server cached by calling it every 5 minutes. There is currently no way to configure this through API, so you’ll have to set this up manually. When this ability is available via API, django-zappa will configure this automatically.