Django behind uwsgi+nginx not able to set cookies

Question

I'm putting together a PoC for a side-project meal-planner tool. I'm using django running on AWS with nginx and uwsgi. The site is running and loading pages, but there is no CSRF cookie being passed to the browser.

The CSRF and Messages middleware are both enabled, and the django debug output lists a value for 'CSRF_COOKIE', and my browser has cookies enabled, so I suspect that Django is attempting to set a cookie which is getting stripped out by nginx or uwsgi.

Configuration information below:

uwsgi.ini

[uwsgi]
chdir=/opt/django/mealplanner/src/mealplanner/
module=mealplanner.wsgi:application
master=True
autoload=True
pidfile=/opt/run/mealplanner.pid
vacuum=True
max-requests=5000
socket=/opt/run/mealplanner.sock
chmod-socket=True
harakiri=120
processes=1
home=/opt/django/mealplanner/src
daemonize=/opt/log/uwsgi/mealplanner.log

nginx.conf

user www-data;
worker_processes 1;
pid /opt/run/nginx.pid;

events {
        worker_connections 768;
        # multi_accept on;                                                                                 
}

http {

        ##                                                                                                 
        # Basic Settings                                                                                   
        ##                                                                                                 

        sendfile on;
        tcp_nopush on;
        tcp_nodelay on;
        keepalive_timeout 65;
        types_hash_max_size 2048;
        # server_tokens off;                                                                               

        # server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;                                                                
        # server_name_in_redirect off;                                                                     

        include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
        default_type application/octet-stream;

        ##                                                                                                 
        # Logging Settings                                                                                 
        ##                                                                                                 

        access_log /opt/log/nginx/access.log;
        error_log /opt/log/nginx/error.log;

        ##                                                                                                 
        # Gzip Settings                                                                                    
        ##                                                                                                 

        gzip on;
        gzip_disable "msie6";

        # gzip_vary on;                                                                                    
        gzip_proxied any;
        gzip_comp_level 2;
        # gzip_buffers 16 8k;                                                                              
        # gzip_http_version 1.1;                                                                           
        gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml \
application/xml+rss text/javascript;

        server {
               listen 80;
               # I've also tried the dns name I access the site with as the server name.
               server_name ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com xx.xx.xx.xx;
               client_max_body_size 50M;
               set $home /opt/django/mealplanner;
               root $home;
               location / {
                        include uwsgi_params;
                        uwsgi_pass unix://opt/run/mealplanner.sock;
                        root $home;
               }
        }

        ##                                                                                                 
        # Virtual Host Configs                                                                             
        ##                                                                                                 

        include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
        include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

Answer 1

It looks like the problem might possibly have been the server_name in nginx.conf. It suddenly started working, and the only thing I had changed was making the server_name match the domain name of the site. On the other hand, changing it back didn't seem to re-introduce the problem, so either I'm not restarting nginx properly or that wasn't the issue after all.

The site is working now, but it's one of those situations where I don't have a satisfactory understanding of the cause and solution, so if anyone can confirm this hypothesis or point out something else I'd welcome the input.