Running Django, Rails and Mojolicious on Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7

Recently released  Helicon Zoo is a repository of popular web frameworks for Microsoft IIS. It makes installing and running Django, Ruby on Rails and Mojolicious on Windows Servers a piece of cake.

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Please read following articles to find information how to run Django, Rails and other popular web engines on IIS:

• Running Django on Windows (with performance tests)
• Node.js on Windows (with performance tests)
• Ruby on Rails on Windows in production
• Deploying Java Servlet applications on Windows with IIS
• Running Railo on IIS in production

And you can find usage examples for various web engines on a usage page.

How it works

Helicon Zoo utilizes Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WebPI) to make installation of web frameworks and all required dependencies easy and smooth. At first, you need to download and install WebPI from Microsoft web site here. This is a great tool that is already packed with many ASP.NET and PHP applications and dependencies to install a whole technology stack on your server. And the greatest thing about WebPI is that it can be extended by adding custom repositories. So copy this link – http://www.helicontech.com/zoo/feed/, open WebPI options

put it into the Display additional scenarios field and click Add feed.

Now if you select Applications, Tools at the bottom of the list, you will find new applications: Blank Django Project, Blank Rails Project, Blank Perl Project, Blank Mojolicious Project

These are all empty “Hello World!” applications used to install all required dependencies which you can stuff with your code later.

So let’s choose Blank Django Project, click Add and Install.  This will create new IIS application with pre-defined configuration. After download and installation are completed you can use Launch application in browser link:

What’s inside

The core of Helicon Zoo is a native IIS 7 (or IIS Express) module that provides FastCGI support. This module differs from Microsoft FCGI module generally developed to provide PHP support for IIS. Helicon Zoo Module is built using super capacitive asynchronous  I/O Completion Port technology. It supports Pipe and TCP transports and additional level of configuration to run many different FastCGI-enabled frameworks. These includes flup tor Python, Rack for Ruby on Rails, FCGI and Plack for Perl and Mojolicious.

The core configuration of Helicon Zoo Module is located in the <heliconZooServer> section of applicationHost.config file. This section defines all FastCGI engines that will work with Zoo. Here is an example of Django FastCGI engine definition using pipe transport; zoofcgi.py is our Python worker with pipe transport support:

<engine name="python.2.7.pipe"
    fullPath="c:\python27\python.exe"
    arguments="-O %SystemDrive%\Zoo\Workers\python\zoofcgi.py"
    transport="pipe" />

How to deploy Django projects

Helicon Zoo offers simple way to deploy your Django applications on the server or test machine. First you install Blank Django Project in desired location using Web Platform Installer, then you overwrite this project content with your project files and set up deployment into this forlder. Blank Django Project installs all required dependencies on target machine and puts web.config (the only file needed for your application) in the root directory of application.

Web.config

Configuration of Zoo-powered applications is done with web.config file. Here is an example of such file to configure Django application for 32-bit.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
 <system.webServer>
  <heliconZoo>
   <application name="django.project.x86" >
    <environmentVariables>
     <add name="PYTHONPATH" value="%APPL_PHYSICAL_PATH%;%PYTHONPATH%" />
     <add name="DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE" value="settings" />
    </environmentVariables>
   </application>
  </heliconZoo>
  <handlers>
   <add name="django.project.x86"
       scriptProcessor="python.2.7.pipe"  path="*" verb="*"
       modules="HeliconZoo_x86" preCondition="bitness32"
       resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" />
  </handlers>
 </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Several important things are defined here:

• scriptProcess="python.2.7.pipe" — a reference to FastCGI engine defined in the applicationHost.config;
• environment variable PYTHONPATH — a path where Python will check to load modules.  Here path to this IIS application is appended to allow Python to load additional modules directly from the directory of your application without installing them globally in the system.
• environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE — a Python path to the configuration file settings.py of your Django project, for example ‘mysite.settings’.

Static content

It is recommended to serve static content omitting Django to save processor time and increase performance. You can easily do this by putting all static files into a directory with the following web.config in it. This will disable Django module in directory:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
 <system.webServer>
  <handlers>
   <remove name="django.project.x86" />
  </handlers>
 </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Django configuration example

Let’s assume our Django project consists of three applications:

• site — a site itself with pages templates, static files, urls.py and settings.py;
• blog;
• store.

Static files are located in site/media and are available as /media/ virtual directory (i.e. MEDIA_URL='/media/').

After we install Blank Django Project in the root of web site and copy our Django application project in it we will have the following directory structure:

/media/ — is a virtual directory which is mapped to site/media and Django is disabled there using web.config file example above. In the root web.config PYTHONPATH points to the site root directory and DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is set to site.settings:

 ...
 <heliconZoo>
   <application name="django.project.x86" >
    <environmentVariables>
     <add name="PYTHONPATH" value="%APPL_PHYSICAL_PATH%" />
     <add name="DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE" value="site.settings" />
    </environmentVariables>
   </application>
  </heliconZoo>
...

That’s all!
Sincerely, Helicon Tech team.