Introduction
I notice a lot of people these days using Heroku to host applications they’ve written with Django or Rails. This may save them some time and effort, but they are spending way more money on this specialized hosting than they would pay for a generic Linux host. They are also giving up control of a large portion of their application. I consider the entire stack to be part of my application, and complete control over all the pieces is mandatory.
Because I encourage people to administer their own servers, I have written this tutorial to remove just one more of their excuses not to do so. This tutorial covers everything you need to do to configure a blank Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS 64-bit server to run a Django application properly. I will not be covering anything about writing the application itself. I will also only provide minimal discussion of some topics, like database configuration. If you can finish this tutorial, you can Google the necessary documentation for other things. The only thing I completely skip is configuration of search using Haystack and Solr since it is not needed by most applications.
If you want to use a different Linux distribution, most of this tutorial will still be correct. You will have to translate all of the apt-get statements and package names to your distribution of choice. Configuration file paths and layouts may also differ. I chose Ubuntu 12.04 because it is very popular, available on almost every host, and its long term support will keep this tutorial relevant for a longer period of time.
