About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. 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. Then I taught photographers how to create good websites. I co-wrote a book along the way. Now I am helping turn a giant media corporation into a digital enterprise. 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. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

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Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

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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.

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