About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. I teach photographers web design and professional skills. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

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I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

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Notes on my new Django setup

My personal record of using revision control for source code has been pretty spotty. Today I took steps toward fixing that by working out a system for managing my Django projects. I wanted revision control (Subversion), I wanted Django's "runserver" for development and mod_python for deployment, and I didn't want it to be a pain.

Some highlights of the process:

I used my pastebin site as the test mule. I checked in the current live site's source code, created "trunk", "tags", and "branches" directories per the Subversion manual, and checked out a copy of the trunk into a staging directory.
I used svn propedit svn:ignore to keep the project's SQLite database file out of the repository. Via my ~/subversion/config file I also ignore few other things such as .pyc files, just so that svn status checks aren't littered with question marks on those files.
I created a simple runserver.sh script that sets $PYTHONPATH (so that imports like from pasteproject import settings find the staging version, not my deployed version!) and starts the Django development server.
Tricky Django thing #1: I use the conditional URLconf trick in order to correctly serve media files when using the development server. The docs on this trick go on to say; "the catch here is that you'll have to remember to set DEBUG=False in your production settings file." Which brings me to...
Tricky Django thing #2: Modular settings. The first line of settings.py is: from pasteproject.settings_local import DEBUG, TEMPLATE_DEBUG, PROJECT_BASE. The file settings_local.py is not under version control, and is of course different for the development and deployment versions. It's only two lines; the first line sets DEBUG and TEMPLATE_DEBUG to True (development) or False (deployment); the custom setting PROJECT_BASE is used to locate the correct SQLite database file and the media files.

All this was a bit of work, but what it saves me in time and worry will more than make up for that.

Update: And of course it wouldn't be an upgrade if I didn't break something -- the pastebin's SQLite database permissions got set to read-only, which I fixed just now.

Sunday, October 29th, 2006
django + tips + web development
2 comments

Some related posts: robots.txt via Django, in one line • Django LogEntry to the rescue • Handling legacy URLs with Django • Root, sweet root • Random crufty open source release of the day • Moving the blog to Django • The twenty-minute trouble ticket system • Django development tips • A minimal wiki in Django • Rails/Django lovefest in Chicago

• Comment from Joshua Bloom , 25 weeks later

For my Django work I'm usually developing on a windows Desktop or Laptop. When my stuff gets deployed it goes up to our linux servers.

In my urls.py files I do something like this:

if os == linux: production = True

if production: #Change where the SITE_MEDIA is being served from.
urlpatterns += patterns('',
(r'^site_media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': '/...'}),
)
else:
urlpatterns += patterns('',
(r'^site_media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': 'C:/...'}),
)

• Comment from Paul , 25 weeks later

Cool! I love seeing the recipes people come up with to handle deployment.

My current setup is a little different now. I no longer use a settings\_local.py; I put a conditional in settings.py itself sort of like your `if os...` line to control `DEBUG` etc. I have a setting called `PROJECT_BASE` which is used by `MEDIA_ROOT` and other settings that reference the filesystem.

I no longer need the conditional URLconf trick that I linked to; if the site is running on Apache (as opposed to Django's runserver), a `SetHandler None` directive keeps Django from seeing any requests for static media.

I hope that we can start to incorporate some of these patterns (suitably generalized) into the framework itself as time goes on.