It’s been quite a while since my last words on these pages. And yes, I’m writing in english, my bad english for a number of reasons… But this is out of scope, so let’s put away the dust and start to write something (hopefully) useful :)
These days I’m experiencing Python and the web full-stack framework Django. They both are impressive, really: starting the development of a webapp is almost straightforward, if you have the time to read the really good documentation available at https://docs.djangoproject.com.
After a bit of exercise, I developed a tutorial application, and I wanted to deploy it with the Apache Web Server since django offers a built-in web server during the development phase (and it’s written in python). Since I’m using a mac, I got some troubles to get mod_wsgi working. So far nothing too much annoying, but I wasted a bit of time so I hope these words can save someone else’s time :-)
I was not happy to use the Apache httpd which come built-in in OSX, so I downloaded the latest release from the Apache site (http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi ) and built it from scratch. Ensure you have the development tools installed in your OS, if not you can download them from the Mac App Store getting Xcode 4 for free…
So after a successful compile of sources
anubis:httpd-2.2.21 fabio$ ./configure \
&& make \
&& sudo make install
I found my apache 2 server ready under the directory /usr/local/apache2.
The next thing, is to install mod_wsgi . If you don’t want to use the built-in osx httpd, you have to download the sources (http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/DownloadTheSoftware), and build them from scratch. This time, take care of where is the apache installation (did just some moments before) and where is your python!
Since I’m using virtualenv, I was almost sure to activate the environment settings and build mod_wsgi from the shell was sufficient… So far this is not the case, I needed to provide the installation path to the configure script, otherwise it will continue to use the python built-in with OSX:
anubis:mod_wsgi-3.3 fabio$ ./configure \
--with-apxs="/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs" \
--with-python="/Users/fabio/Sviluppo/python-2.7/bin/python" \
&& make \
&& sudo make install
where /Users/fabio/Sviluppo/python-2.7/bin/python is the directory where I installed python 2.7 and django via virtualenv and pip.
It’s now time to configure Apache. Of course using vi :)
anubis:conf fabio$ sudo vi httpd.conf
and inside I added the following lines
Alias /media/ /Users/fabio/Sviluppo/booklibrary/media/
<directory /Users/fabio/Sviluppo/booklibrary/media>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</directory>
#MOD_WSGI
LoadModule wsgi_module modules/mod_wsgi.so
WSGIDaemonProcess books user=fabio group=staff python-path=/Users/fabio/Sviluppo/python-2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages processes=2 threads=25
WSGIProcessGroup books
WSGIScriptAlias / /Users/fabio/Sviluppo/booklibrary/apache/booklibrary.wsgi
#WSGIScriptAlias /books /Users/fabio/Sviluppo/booklibrary/apache/test.wsgi
<directory /Users/fabio/Sviluppo/booklibrary/apache>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</directory>
Since the django app is in my home directory, we must ensure apache is able to run the code. This is accomplished with the lines
- WSGIDaemonProcess books user=fabio group=staff …
- WSGIProcessGroup books
The others are simply mappings and aliases which are almost straightforward.
Last but not least, the file .wsgi. I wrote 2 versions, one was a mere test of a correct installation of mod_wsgi in apache (test.wsgi):
import sys
def application(environ, start_response):
status = '200 OK'
output = 'It Works! -- Python executable at '+ sys.executable
response_headers = [('Content-Type', 'text/plain'), ('Content-Length', str(len(output)))]
start_response(status, response_headers)
return [output]
the other is the one which make the django app start:
import os
import sys
#sys.path.append('/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/django')
#/Users/fabio/Sviluppo/python-2.7/bin/
paths = ['/Users/fabio/Sviluppo',
'/Users/fabio/Sviluppo/booklibrary']
for path in paths:
if path not in sys.path:
sys.path.append(path)
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'booklibrary.settings'
import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()
And that’s all ;)
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