Deployment Options

PoWA can be deployed easily using multiple methods.

First you have to install and configure PoWA and powa-web like in the quickstart section. Check that the powa-web executable works before proceeding.

Powa-web script

The easiest option is to rely only on the provided powa-web script. You can configure it to serve HTTPS traffic, however it’s not recommended to expose it directly but instead configure a reverse proxy like NGINX.

NGINX

You can use NGINX as a reverse proxy to powa-web. It makes it possible to bind it to system ports (lower than 1024), and add HTTPS.

Just add a new site to your configuration. Depending on your distribution, it will be somewhere like /etc/nginx/sites (RedHat derivatives), /etc/nginx/sites-available (Debian derivatives, you’ll have to then do a symlink to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled to enable this site).

Put this, for example, in the configuration file (if you just want HTTPS proxying, and no virtualhost):

server {
  listen 0.0.0.0:443 http2 ssl default_server;
  server_name _;

  ssl_certificate /etc/pki/tls/certs/self-signed.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/pki/tls/certs/self-signed.key;

  access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log upstream;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

  client_max_body_size 15M;

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8888;
  }
}

You’ll obviously need to produce certificates, which is out of scope of this documentation.

If you just need HTTP, just change listen to 0.0.0.0:80, and remove ssl. Something like this:

server {
  listen 0.0.0.0:80 http2 default_server;
  server_name _;

  ssl_certificate /etc/pki/tls/certs/self-signed.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/pki/tls/certs/self-signed.key;

  access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log upstream;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

  client_max_body_size 15M;

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8888;
  }
}

Apache

Note

The wsgi compatibility has been removed from tornado 6.1.0 and is not a recommended way to deploy powa-web anymore.

PoWA can also easily be deployed using Apache mod_wsgi module.

In your apache configuration file, you should:

• load the mod_wsgi module

• configure it.

The various python3.4 version in the paths below should be set your actual python version:

LoadModule wsgi_module modules/mod_wsgi.so
<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName myserver.example.com

  DocumentRoot /var/www/

  ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/powa.error.log
  CustomLog /var/log/httpd/powa.access.log combined

  WSGIScriptAlias / /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/powa/powa.wsgi

  Alias /static /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/powa/static/
</VirtualHost>