Summary

In this chapter, we went into the details about how web servers work, and the different layers that are involved.

We started by describing the fundamental details of the request-response and web server architecture. Then, we moved on to describe a system with three layers, using nginx as the front web server and uWSGI to handle multiple Python workers that run Django code.

We started with the web server itself, which allows you to serve HTTP, directly return the static content stored in files, and route it towards the next layer. We analyzed the different configuration elements, including enabling header forwarding and logging.

We continued by describing how uWSGI works and how it's able to create and set up different processes that interact through the WSGI protocol in Python. We described how to set up the interaction with the previous level (the nginx web server) and the next level (the Python code). We also described how the workers can be restarted in...