"User 'wsgi' not found" when starting uWSGI

Question

I'm currently trying to set up a server on Amazon EC2 (Ubuntu 11.10) using web.py, nginx and uWSGI as shown here: http://blog.nobien.net/2011/08/14/nginx-uwsgi-and-web-py-and-my-new-job/

I've installed everything, and saved all the scripts from that page in the same folder. I then edited the uwsgi.sh script to point to the location of uwsgi.yaml.

I then ran sh nginx.sh start which worked, then sh uwsgi.sh start, which resulted in the following error message:

Starting uwsgi: start-stop-daemon: user 'uwsgi' not found

I noticed that the uwsgi.sh script has a few lines like this, but their purpose was not explained in the blog post:

OWNER=uwsgi

NAME=uwsgi
DESC=uwsgi

Do I replace these with 'root', or make a new user purely for uwsgi to run under?

Answer 1

Most people would create a uwsgi user, as you correctly guessed, and this is what your scripts assume. If for some reason you don't want to do this, you would run it as user "www-data", but you shouldn't use root. (If you want to use a user other than uwsgi, you should probably only change the "OWNER=uwsgi" line, not the other lines, which only give a name and a description to the service.)

Also note that Ubuntu 11.10 seems to have ready-made packages for uwsgi, so it might be preferable to install them with "apt-get install uwsgi". Most probably these packages will automatically create the uwsgi user when you install them.