Django Deployment - issue with supervisor failing (exited too quickly)

I bet you are following the “simple is better than complex” “tutorial”. Actually people have been stuck with that issue for years. Nobody knows how to solve it and has made thousands of people quit the attempt to launch the app as it should with gunicorn and supervisor. There are countless of “tutorials” doing as if they were tutorials by presenting “how to properly configure and set up a full fledged django app in a production server”, but, why would they want to tell you how to do it? you would become a competitor and snatch jobs from them, so what they do is deliberately leave bugs that you will never be able to solve, so you can’t launch the application. They write tutorials to make a name for themselves, but not to teach you.

The error indicates several issues with your setup, particularly with paths, permissions, and the environment configuration. Let’s address each one step-by-step:

Shebang Line Error

The line:

#!/bin/bash

should ensure the script uses the Bash shell. However, if the system cannot recognize the shebang, it may default to another shell (e.g., sh). Ensure the script begins with:

#!/bin/bash

and the file encoding is correct. Use dos2unix to fix any Windows-style line endings:

sudo apt install dos2unix
dos2unix /home/happ/gunicorn_start

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2. Path Issues

The error cd: can’t cd to /home/happ/happ suggests the directory doesn’t exist or the script lacks permissions. Verify the directory exists and has the correct permissions:

ls -ld /home/happ/happ

Ensure the directory is accessible to the happ user:

sudo chown -R happ:happ /home/happ/happ
chmod -R 750 /home/happ/happ

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3. Virtual Environment Activation

The error source: not found may occur because the sh shell (used by default) does not recognize source. Replace source with ., which is POSIX-compliant:

. ../venv/bin/activate

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4. Gunicorn Path

The error exec: ../venv/bin/gunicorn: not found suggests the script cannot locate Gunicorn. Verify that Gunicorn is installed in your virtual environment:

/home/happ/venv/bin/pip show gunicorn

If it’s not installed, add it:

/home/happ/venv/bin/pip install gunicorn

Also, confirm the correct path to Gunicorn. Use the absolute path to Gunicorn in your gunicorn_start file:

exec /home/happ/venv/bin/gunicorn ${DJANGO_WSGI_MODULE}:application \
  --name $NAME \
  --workers $WORKERS \
  --user=$USER \
  --group=$GROUP \
  --bind=$BIND \
  --log-level=$LOG_LEVEL \
  --log-file=-

---

5. Supervisor Configuration

Your Supervisor configuration may not properly recognize your script. Ensure gunicorn_start is executable:

chmod +x /home/happ/gunicorn_start

Then, update Supervisor:

sudo supervisorctl reread
sudo supervisorctl update
sudo supervisorctl restart happ

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6. Log Permissions

Ensure the happ user can write to the logs directory:

sudo mkdir -p /home/happ/logs
sudo chown happ:happ /home/happ/logs
chmod 750 /home/happ/logs

---

7. Debugging with Supervisor

If the script still fails, try running it manually as the happ user to see detailed errors:

sudo -u happ bash /home/happ/gunicorn_start

Check Supervisor logs for more details:

sudo tail -f /var/log/supervisor/supervisord.log
sudo tail -f /home/happ/logs/gunicorn.log

---

8. Supervisor and Environment Variables

Ensure Supervisor has access to your environment variables. Modify happ.conf to include the environment directive:

[program:happ]
command=/home/happ/gunicorn_start
user=happ
autostart=true
autorestart=true
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/home/happ/logs/gunicorn.log
stderr_logfile=/home/happ/logs/gunicorn_error.log
environment=DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="happ.settings",PYTHONPATH="/home/happ/happ:$PYTHONPATH"