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How to manage uWSGI configuration

In our Django applications, the uWSGI gateway to the load-balancers is part of the customer application:

uWSGI is already configured and optimised in these applications. Most of this configuration is managed by Aldryn Django; see also How to fine-tune your server's performance.

All of uWSGI's configuration can be managed entirely within the application, according to your own requirements, but be warned that misconfiguration can be severely detrimental to an application's performance.

uWSGI environment variables​

uWSGI offers a vast number of configuration variables. Any one of them can be set using an environment variable starting UWSGI_, followed by the name of the variable in uppercase.

For example, the processes variable can be configured by setting UWSGI_PROCESSES.

Generally you will not need to touch these variables, and we recommend leaving them alone unless you need to change something and you know what you are doing.

uWSGI buffer size​

One setting that occasionally needs to be adjusted is UWSGI_BUFFER_SIZE. The default value is 4096. If your site has to deal with very large request headers, you may receive a web invalid request block size error in your application's logs.

In this case, you can increase the buffer size to allow larger request headers. (You may also want to find out why your site is running into such large request headers - for example, its cookies may be excessively large.)

More complex configuration​

The uWSGI gateway can handle requests before they reach your application's code, which is faster and less expensive than doing it in, say, Django (though not as convenient).

The configuration of this behaviour is often too complex to be expressed in simple environment variables; instead, it can be achieved by including a uWSGI configuration file.

The uWSGI configuration file needs to be specified using uWSGI's include option, i.e. with the UWSGI_INCLUDE environment variable. For example:

UWSGI_INCLUDE=uwsgi.ini

Then the file can contain the additional configuration required.

It is beyond the scope of this documentation to discuss this in detail, but a typical use-case would be to perform a redirect. In such a case you could add a rule to the uwsgi.ini file specified above:

[uwsgi]
route = old rewrite:new

(This will redirect a request from old to new.)