finish setting up nginx & gunicorn

[allynt]

Use nginx to redirect default heroku domain to custom domain.

nginx should also improve latency issues.

• buildpack: https://elements.heroku.com/buildpacks/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nginx

• documentation: https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nginx/blob/main/PROXY.md

---

• serve app w/ nginx acting as a reverse-proxy for gunicorn
• redirect http to https
• redirect subdomain ("www")
• redirect default domain
• clean up old middleware
• use gunicorn config file instead of command-line arguments
• fine-tune number of workers, etc.

[allynt]

This will be a much better way of doing redirection than grumpy.core.middleware.DomainRedirectionMiddleware. As part of this ticket, I should comment-out that class.

...but while I'm at it, I could improve the middleware code a bit by adding:

    url = f"{scheme}://{domain}/{path}".format(
        scheme=request.scheme,
        domain=site_domain,
        path=request.get_full_path(),
    )
    return redirect(url, permanent=True)

[allynt]

Note I have to use heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 instead of heroku buildpacks:set as in the documentation b/c my app now has multiple buildpacks.

[allynt]

...okay, I think it's working.

I modified "Procfile" to include:

web: bin/start-nginx gunicorn -b unix:/tmp/nginx.socket -p /tmp/app-initialized config.wsgi

Note that I am explicitly setting the bind and the pid file instead of encoding it all in "gunicorn.conf.py". In fact, I am no longer using that file. I'm not sure why I had to do it this way, and I would much prefer to use a config file.

I am also just accepting the default nginx configuration. I'm definitely not happy with that, b/c I want to customise it to forward HTTP to HTTPS.

[allynt]

Here’s a simple Nginx configuration snippet that will redirect all requests from www.foo.com to www.bar.com using a 301 permanent redirect::

server {    
  listen 80;    
  server_name www.foo.com;    
  # Redirect all requests to www.bar.com    
  return 301 $scheme://www.bar.com$request_uri
;}

Explanation:

• listen 80; → Listens on port 80 (HTTP).
• server_name www.foo.com; → Matches requests for www.foo.com.
• return 301 $scheme://www.bar.com$request_uri; → Issues a permanent redirect (301) to the same path and query string on www.bar.com.
  • $scheme preserves the protocol (http or https).
  • $request_uri preserves the original path and query parameters.

[allynt]

server_name _
"_" is a special placeholder often used to indicate a default server block for a given listen directive.

What it means:

• The underscore (_) is not a wildcard; it’s just a literal string.
• Nginx does not treat _ specially—it’s simply a name that almost no real domain will match.
• This is commonly used as a convention to make it clear that this server block is the "catch-all" for requests that don’t match any other server_name.

So I should have the redirect branch above the default branch.

[allynt]

Note that the above block needs to occur after the catch-all block. That doesn't make sense to me. But, whatever.

[allynt]

Accepting the default number of workers. The nginx config is already specific to heroku.