tornaado nginx configuration

Running Tornado in production

At FriendFeed, we use nginx as a load balancer and static file server. We run multiple instances of the Tornado web server on multiple frontend machines. We typically run one Tornado frontend per core on the machine (sometimes more depending on utilization).

When running behind a load balancer like nginx, it is recommended to pass xheaders=True to the HTTPServer constructor. This will tell Tornado to use headers like X-Real-IP to get the user's IP address instead of attributing all traffic to the balancer's IP address.

This is a barebones nginx config file that is structurally similar to the one we use at FriendFeed. It assumes nginx and the Tornado servers are running on the same machine, and the four Tornado servers are running on ports 8000 - 8003:

<code>user nginx;
worker_processes 1;

error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections 1024;
    use epoll;
}

http {
    # Enumerate all the Tornado servers here
    upstream frontends {
        server 127.0.0.1:8000;
        server 127.0.0.1:8001;
        server 127.0.0.1:8002;
        server 127.0.0.1:8003;
    }

    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type application/octet-stream;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;

    keepalive_timeout 65;
    proxy_read_timeout 200;
    sendfile on;
    tcp_nopush on;
    tcp_nodelay on;
    gzip on;
    gzip_min_length 1000;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css text/xml
               application/x-javascript application/xml
               application/atom+xml text/javascript;

    # Only retry if there was a communication error, not a timeout
    # on the Tornado server (to avoid propagating "queries of death"
    # to all frontends)
    proxy_next_upstream error;

    server {
        listen 80;

        # Allow file uploads
        client_max_body_size 50M;

        location ^~ /static/ {
            root /var/www;
            if ($query_string) {
                expires max;
            }
        }
        location = /favicon.ico {
            rewrite (.*) /static/favicon.ico;
        }
        location = /robots.txt {
            rewrite (.*) /static/robots.txt;
        }

        location / {
            proxy_pass_header Server;
            proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
            proxy_redirect false;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Scheme $scheme;
            proxy_pass http://frontends;
        }
    }
}
</code>