Setting up a Django work environment

In my journey to learn python, the next step is to learn Django. Django is a web framework powered by python, so to use it we need to make sure we have python installed:

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adrian@my-xubuntu:~$ python -V
Python 2.7.3

Now we can go ahead and install the Django package

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sudo apt-get install python-django

That installation makes Django automatically available to python, so you can do something like this:

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adrian@my-xubuntu:~$ python
Python 2.7.3 (default, Sep 26 2012, 21:51:14)
[GCC 4.7.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import django
>>> django.VERSION
(1, 4, 1, 'final', 0)

In case you are curious you can find the Django installation on /usr/share/pyshared/django/.

Creating a new Django project

Now that we know Django is installed we need to create a Django project. I usually place all my web projects on /home/adrian/www/, so I will do the same for this one:

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cd /home/adrian/www/
sudo django-admin startproject djangotest

This creates a folder named djangotest with the most basic structure for a Django project. These are the files created by django-admin:

manage.py: A command-line utility that lets you interact with this Django project in various ways.

mysite/: The actual Python package for your project. Its name is the Python package name you’ll need to use to import anything inside it (e.g. import mysite.settings).

mysite/__init__.py: An empty file that tells Python that this directory should be considered a Python package.

mysite/settings.py: Settings/configuration for this Django project.

mysite/urls.py: The URL declarations for this Django project; a “table of contents” of your Django-powered site.

mysite/wsgi.py: An entry-point for WSGI-compatible webservers to serve your project.

To make sure everything is working correctly so far:

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cd /home/adrian/www/djangotest/
python manage.py runserver
Validating models...

0 errors found
Django version 1.4.1, using settings 'djangotest.settings'
Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.

You should be able to go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and see a page saying that you have configured your first Django page correctly.

Hooking to Apache

Now the only thing left is hooking Django to apache to have a production-like set-up. Since I usually work with a lot of web projects at the same time I create a virtual host for each project:

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cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
sudo touch djangotest

This is the content for my djangotest virtual host:

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<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName djangotest.dev
    ServerAlias www.djangotest.dev
    DocumentRoot /home/adrian/www/djangotest

    WSGIScriptAlias / /home/adrian/www/djangotest/djangotest/wsgi.py

    <Directory /home/adrian/www/djangotest>
        <Files wsgi.py>
            Order deny,allow
            Allow from all
        </Files>
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

To finalize we need to add one line at the end of /etc/apache/apache2.conf:

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WSGIPythonPath /home/adrian/Dev/djangotest

Now we can go to http://djangotest.dev and we will see the same Django welcome page we saw on the previous step.

Running multiple sites in the same server

You may have noticed from last step that we added a line to our apache2.conf file:

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WSGIPythonPath /home/adrian/Dev/djangotest

This line is pointing directly to our project folder, so an obvious question arises: What if I want to have more than one project in the same machine?. To make this possible we need to configure mod_wsgi to run in daemon mode.

First we need to remove the line we added to apache2.conf. Then we will add two lines to our virtual host:

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WSGIDaemonProcess djangotest.dev python-path=/home/adrian/Dev/djangotest processes=2 threads=15 display-name=%{GROUP}
WSGIProcessGroup djangotest.dev

The whole virtual host file will look like this:

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<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName djangotest.dev
    ServerAlias www.djangotest.dev
    DocumentRoot /home/adrian/Dev/djangotest

    WSGIScriptAlias / /home/adrian/Dev/djangotest/djangotest/wsgi.py
    WSGIDaemonProcess djangotest.dev python-path=/home/adrian/Dev/djangotest processes=2 threads=15 display-name=%{GROUP}
    WSGIProcessGroup djangotest.dev

    # This line is necessary so Django can load static content (css, js, etc)
    # for it's build in libraries
    Alias /static/ /usr/share/pyshared/django/contrib/admin/static/

    <Directory /home/adrian/Dev/djangotest>
        <Files wsgi.py>
            Order deny,allow
            Allow from all
        </Files>
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Now you can configure as many Django projects as you want in your server.