I'm getting a "502 Bad Gateway / Backend" or a "504-loadbalancer" error. What to do next?

Try hitting "Reload" again¶

It may just be a glitch! Reloading often clears things up.

Wait for the web app to be fully reloaded¶

Sometimes, if you go and visit your site immediately after hitting the "Reload" button, you end up trying to access the site while it's still reloading, and that can cause a bad gateway error. Make sure the spinner has stopped before viewing the site.

Look for import errors or syntax errors in your WSGI file¶

If your WSGI file is totally broken, that can cause a 502 bad gateway error, and it wouldn't end up in the error logs.

In almost all other cases, we should be able to catch exceptions and send them to your error logs (you have checked your error logs haven't you?)

Don't use app.run() (for Flask) or try to run your own web server¶

Flask's app.run() call tries to create its own web server, which is typically what you would use on your own machine.

On our servers, we run web server processes for you (using uWSGI), so there's no need to use app.run(). Just provide the wsgi application as a variable called "application", and we'll do the rest.

But if you try and call app.run(), it conflicts with our web worker and breaks stuff. Similarly if you try and manually bind to a local port.

Don't call django.setup in your web app code¶

django.setup is a function that is used to initialise Django in a script so that you can use Django features in it. It re-initialises the logging system. When you call it in a web app, it breaks the logging and you will see a large number of log lines like this in your server log:

--- Logging error ---
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/logging/handlers.py", line 940, in emit#012    self.socket.sendto(msg, self.address)
OSError: [Errno 9] Bad file descriptor

Look for any slow code that might be timing out¶

We set a 5-minute timeout on web requests. Look through your server log (linked from the web tab) for any messages saying "Harakiri" -- they indicate a worker was killed taking too long to process a request.

If you need to do some heavy processing or number crunching in your web app, check out the tips here

Contact support if nothing else works¶

We're always happy to help. Use the "send feedback" button, or post in the forums, or email us at support@pythonanywhere.com.