Nginx – the purpose of running nginx infront of your app servers on Amazon EC2

I had the same issue with genericpath.py giving a UnicodeEncodeError when attempting to upload a file name with non ASCII characters.

I was using nginx, uwsgi and django with python 2.7.

Everything was working OK locally but not on the server

Here are the steps I took 1. added to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (did not fix the problem)

http {
    charset utf-8;
}

2. I added this line to etc/default/locale (did not fix the problem)

LANGUAGE="en_US.UTF-8"

3. I followed the instructions here listed under the heading 'Success' https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/ExpectedTestFailures (did not fix the problem)

   aptitude install language-pack-en-base
   

4. Found across this ticket https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17816 which suggested testing a view on the server to what was happening with locale information

In your view

import locale
locales = "Current locale: %s %s -- Default locale: %s %s" % (locale.getlocale() + locale.getdefaultlocale())

In your template

{{ locales }}

For me, the issue was that I had no locale and no default locale on my Ubuntu server (though I did have them on my local OSX dev machine) then files with non ASCII file names/paths will not upload correctly with python raising a UnicodeEncodeError, but only on the production server.

Solution

I added this to both my site and my site admin uwsgi config files e.g. /etc/uwsgi-emperor/vassals/my-site-config-ini file

env = LANG=en_US.utf8

Glancing at the Instagram post, I don't believe they're using Nginx for buffering or caching (although I could be wrong). I use something similar but with HAProxy instead of Nginx.

Some of the reasons why we took this approach:

• Nginx and HAProxy operate at layer 7, whereas ELB is later 4. If you need layer 7 services, ELB can't provide it
• Graceful connection termination when health checks fail. The ELB can continue passing traffic to HAProxy/Nginx while traffic is bled off of the out-of-service instance. See https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=231571
• You can scale out the load balancing layer live if necessary
• Better metrics about traffic and performance of each instance behind the HAProxy/Nginx layer
• ELB can detect when an HAProxy instance has failed and stop sending traffic to it