I'm going to be hopefully deploying the first of many (fingers crossed!) projects through Heroku here soon. My concerns about a git and pip driven environment are that it becomes difficult to clone our internal reusable private Github repo apps through pip. For example, we have apps for blogs, comments, feedback, search, and so on that can be reused in other projects. What I have seen so far are that you can use either HTTP auth by embedding a username/password in the URL or jump through hoops generating an SSH key.
I appreciate you guys taking the time to read this. There are a million other things I'm sure you could be doing right now instead so thanks :)
I would recommend setting up a private PyPI server. I've been researching it recently, and the one that seemed best to me was devpi.
Alternatively, a paid-for service such as Gemfury may be more appropriate for you. I personally rejected it because it does not support releasing python packages the normal (sdist upload) way, but perhaps that was unfair.
Related
I'm trying to setup nginx, gunicorn, supervisor and trac, it is all working fine, even the static files which I asked for help here some days before... but the authentification. How does it works??
I know about the basic/digest authentification with nginx... but is there any plugin or something to have authentification without to setup basic/digest authentification in nginx? I mean, is there some web-based authentification?
I've found an AccountManager plugin, but seems that it has been discontinued or it doesn't receive any update (at least for installation directions)
If it is not posible to setup trac with some kind of web/psql authentification, tell me about an alternative based in python, please.
I'm considering taiga because it's based on django at the back and looks very good, but I'm afraid it goes private software in the future, so i wanted to find a completely open source solution here.
Thanks
I'm considering taiga because it's based on django at the back and
looks very good, but I'm afraid it goes private software in the
future, so i wanted to find a completely open source solution here.
Taiga developers here! Taiga is not going open source in the future. We will charge for private projects, but public projects will always be free and Open Source self-hosted version will always be available. So please, don't worry about this or write us to our mailing list (some people asked this already)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/taigaio
We are happy that you considered Taiga.
I'm a freelance editor and tutor as well as a fiction writer and artist looking to transition to the latter on a full-time basis. Naturally, part of that transition involves constructing a website; a dynamic site to which new content in various forms can be added with ease. Now, I've always intended to learn how to program, and I simply haven't the money to hire someone else to do it. So, having had a good experience with my brief dabblings in Python, I decided I'd go with Django for building my site.
I set up a Fedora Virtualbox for a development environment (as I didn't want to jump through hoops to make Windows work) and went to town on some Django tutorials. Everything went swimmingly until life intervened and I didn't touch the project for three weeks. I'm in a position to return to it now, but I've realized two things in the process. First, I'm having to do a fair bit of retracing of my steps just to find where certain files are, and second, I don't know how I'd go about deploying the site after I'm done building it. My intention is to get the cheapest Linode and host off that until some theoretical point in the future where I required more.
I suspect that re: the file organization issue, that's just something I'll become more familiar with over time, though if there are any tricks I should be aware of to simplify the structure of my overall Django development space, I'm eager to know them. However, what about deployment? How viable is it to, with sufficient knowledge, automate the process of pushing the whole file structure of a site with Git? And how can I do that in such a way that it doesn't tamper with the settings of my development environment?
As a Django developer i can assure you that it grows on you and becomes easier to understand the development environment.
You should remember that settings.py is probably going to be where your thoughts will be for quite a while in the start; the good part is that its only once, after you got it up and running you'll only touch settings.py to add new modules or change some configuration but its unlikely.
I believe there are hosts that integrate with git so that should not be a problem since you will probably just git clone your project's url into the host (and not forget to enable/configure wsgi)
To leave the settings.py out of the mess, you will tell git not to track the file with: git rm file; and then when you add your files for commit you do it with git add -u so it refers only to your tracked files.
I'm not sure if i was clear enough. (probably not) But, i hope i could help you in some way.
I have developed a few python programs that I want to make available online.
I am new to web services, and I am not sure what I need to do in order to create a service where somebody makes a request to an URL (for example), and the URL triggers a Python program that displays something in the user's browser, or a set of inputs are given to the program via browser, and then python does whatver it is supposed to do.
I was playing with the google app engine, which runs fine with the tutorial, and was planning to use it becuase it looks easy, but the problem with GAE is that it does not work well (or does not work at all) with some libraries that I plan to use.
I guess what I am trying to do is some sort of API using my WebFaction account.
Can anybody point me in the right directions? What choices do I have in WebFaction? What are the easiest tools available?
Thank you very much for your help in advance.
Cheers
Well, your question is a little bit generic, but here are a few pointers/tips:
Webfaction allows you to install pretty much anything you want (you need to compile it / or ask the admins to install some CentOS package for you).
They provide some default Apache server with mod_wsgi, so you can run web2py, Django or any other wsgi frameworks.
Most popular Python web frameworks have available installers in Webfaction (web2py, django...), so I would recommend you to go with one of them.
I would also install supervisord to keep your service running after some reboot/crash/problem.
I would be glad to help you if you have any specific question...
I have picked up python/django just barely a year. Deployment of django site is still a subject that I have many questions about, though I have successfully manual deployed my site. One of my biggest questions around deployment is what measures can I take to safeguard the source code of my apps, including passwords in django's setting.py, from others, especially when my site runs on a virtual hosting provided by some 3rd party. Call me paranoid but the fact that my source code is running on a third-party server, which someone has the privileges to access anything/anywhere on the server, makes me feel uneasy.
There is almost no scenario where your hosting provider would be interested in your source code. The source code of most websites just isn't worth very much.
If you really feel it is necessary to protect your source code, the best thing to do is serve it from a system that you own and control physically and have exclusive access to.
Failing that, there are a few techniques for obfuscating python, the most straightforward of which is to only push .pyc files and not .py files to your production server. However, this is not standard practice with Django because theft of web site source code by hosting providers is not really an extant problem. I do not know whether or not this technique would work with Django specifically.
If someone has the privileges to access anything/anywhere on the server you can't do much, because what you can do others can do too, you can try some way of obfuscation but that will not work. Only solution is NOT to use such shared repository.
Edit: options
Keep working with shared repository if your data is not very sensitive
Use dedicated hosting from companies like rack-space etc
Use AWS to run your own instance
Use google-app-engine server but that may require a DB change
Run your own server (most secure)
While your source code's probably fine where it is, I'd recommend not storing your configuration passwords in plaintext, whether the code file is compiled or not. Rather, have a hash of the appropriate password on the server, have the server generate a hash of the password submitted during login and compare those instead. Standard security practice.
Then again I could just be talking out my rear end since I haven't fussed about with Django yet.
Protecting source code is not that important IMHO. I would just deploy compiled files and not worry too much about it.
Protecting your config (specially passwords) is indeed important. Temia's point is good.
I am developping a django app on Windows, SQLite and the django dev server . I have deployed it to my host server which is running Linux, Apache, FastCgi, MySQL.
Unfortunately, I have an error returned by the server on the prod while everything ok on the dev machine. I've asked my provider for a pre-production solution in order to be able to debug and understand the problem.
Anyway, what are according to you the most likely errors that can happen when moving a django app from dev to prod?
Best
Update: I think that a pre-prod is the best way to address this kind of problem. But I would like to build a check list of what must be done before to put in production.
Thanks for the very valuable answers that I received until now :)
Update: FYI, I 've implemented the preprod server and the email notification as suggested by shanyu and I can see that the error comes from the smart_if templatetag that I am using on this new version. Any trick with template tags?
Update: I think I've fixed the pb which was caused I think by the Filezilla FTP sending. I was using the "replace if newer" option which I guess is causing some unexpected results. Using the "replace all" option fix the issue. However, it was an opportunity for me to learn more about deployment. Thansk for your answers.
Problems I typically have include:
Misconfigured productions settings, whether in my production localsettings.py, wsgi/cgi, or apache site files in /etc/sites-available
Database differences. I use South for migrations and have run into some subtle issues when performing my migration on PostgreSQL when it worked smoothly in sqlite.
Static file hosting since I cheat and use the Django server in development
Permissions, both on the file system and within the database
Rare, but possible, network issues preventing me from getting my dependencies, whether on PyPi or some 3rd party site
Ways that I have mitigated these issues:
Use the same database in production and development (in your case, MySQL everywhere)
I've found it is useful to have a "test" environment which mimics production in every way possible (it can be on lower end hardware, or even the same machine). This way, if there are any issues in this "production-like" enivornment, I can solve them without taking my production server offline.
Script everything for repeatable deployments. I use fabric, but zc.buildout or Paver would also work. These tools help reduce typos while deploying and reduce the time to deploy my app.
Use version control (mercurial, git, subversion) and a schema migration tool (like South), so if something does go wrong when you deploy to production, you have the possibility of backing out the changes and allowing production to run on the old code with the old database schema.
I haven't set up an "egg proxy" yet, but I am considering it, to avoid issues when downloading dependencies.
I've found pip's freezing dependencies to be useful, in case a new, incompatible change to a library occurred since I downloaded it initially
Use a web testing framework like Windmill or Selenium to test my application in my "test" environment, so that I can get a lot of test coverage of my system very quickly.
Regarding your case, I can think of 2 simple things that may help you:
You can enable Django to send messages when exceptions occur giving details about them. Look at here for details.
You'll be better off if you set up a test environment on the prod server (say, test.example.com) so that you can check if things will go smoothly or not before you deploy the app.
I believe these were the podcasts I listened to recently (from Pycon 2009):
Locate Django in the Real World (PyCon 2009):
http://advocacy.python.org/podcasts/pycon.rss
Parts 1 to 3
Very good introduction to designing your apps for deployment, in particular for reuse and redeployment.
Regs.