Understanding Whirwind deployment

[Angel Medrano]

Hi,
First of all, please excuse my ignorance :D
I come from a PHP background and have been slowly making my way over
to Python based development.
Im trying to understand what it would take to deploy Tornado on a
production server, I'm used to having most of that web server stuff
figured out by a host company or App Engine or Django.So....
Whirlwind-->Tornado vs Traditional Apache set up(ex: would I still
need Apache etc.) I know that is extremely noobish!!!
Can anyone recommend any resources to learn about that topic? Perhaps
maybe any ideas or direction on the topic would be helpful as well.
Looking forward to exploring Whirlwind!
-am

[Matt Dennebaum]

Hi Angel,

No problem, its a good question and something that we will eventually
cover in our docs (which are admittedly very sparse at this point).
For the mean time since the underlying web server is tornado you can
refer to their production deployment docs here:
http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation#running-tornado-in-production.
We run our whirlwind apps with the same setup they suggest and it
works very well. That said you could potentially use apache with
something like mod_proxy_balancer as well if thats more to your
liking. We like nginx because its fast and lightweight.

One thing that gets a bit annoying with running tornado apps is
starting up all the instances that your load balancer to proxy too.
There are bunch of approaches that people have come up with. Most of
which are overcomplicated. So we created an init.d script that should
help with this. Look here https://github.com/trendrr/whirlwind/tree/master/etc.
Basically you have a config file that lives in etc. This defines the
ports you want to start whirlwind instances on and then a start up
script that lives in your /etc/init.d directory. Then its a simple
matter of:

/etc/init.d/whirlwind start
/etc/init.d/whirlwind restart
/etc/init.d/whirlwind stop

Please note that this will not work on windows.

As for not needing apache (or some sort of other load balancer) you
could in theory start whirlwind on port 80 but to be honest I wouldn't
suggest it. The tornado docs cover a few reasons why you wouldn't want
to do this.

Hope that helps and thx for checking out whirlwind. :)

best,
Matt