Without knowing exactly what you tried, it's hard to give you a very detailed answer, but hopefully this points you in the right direction.

A Nginx reverse proxy configuration would normally look something like this:

upstream app_server {
    server 127.0.0.1:9000 fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

    index index.html index.htm;

    client_max_body_size 4G;
    server_name example.com;

    keepalive_timeout 5;

    location /static {
        root /path/to/staric/files;
    }

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_pass http://app_server;
    }
}

Though if you are using Mezzanine, you might want to consider using Fabric to handle your deployment needs. Each Mezzanine project should come with a fabfile.py that will automate setting up a stanadrd Nginx/Gunicorn/Postgres stack. Check out the Mezzanine docs.

Youll need to add some server specific configurable variables in the project’s settings.py module. Here’s an example:

FABRIC = {
    "SSH_USER": "", # SSH username for host deploying to
    "HOSTS": ALLOWED_HOSTS[:1], # List of hosts to deploy to (eg, first host)
    "DOMAINS": ALLOWED_HOSTS, # Domains for public site
    "REPO_URL": "ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/user/project", # Project's repo URL
    "VIRTUALENV_HOME":  "", # Absolute remote path for virtualenvs
    "PROJECT_NAME": "", # Unique identifier for project
    "REQUIREMENTS_PATH": "requirements.txt", # Project's pip requirements
    "GUNICORN_PORT": 8000, # Port gunicorn will listen on
    "LOCALE": "en_US.UTF-8", # Should end with ".UTF-8"
    "DB_PASS": "", # Live database password
    "ADMIN_PASS": "", # Live admin user password
    "SECRET_KEY": SECRET_KEY,
    "NEVERCACHE_KEY": NEVERCACHE_KEY,
}