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Running django on Site5

It took me an entire day, yes it did! I went here : http://wiki.site5.com/Python/Django/Django_installer. Browsed the forums. No help! Then I started on my own. I noticed that virtual python is loading the modules from the main python lib (/usr/lib/python2.4) instead of the local copy. I imported sys and read the sys.modules list. It pretty much made sense. If python doesn’t run locally (inside the virtual environment), it will try to install easy_install into the server wide path. You can’t achieve that unless you’re the root.

While looking for an alternative, I found virtualenv. It not only worked, it also shipped with a built in easy_install.

Later, when I set things up, I noticed that my app was breaking because Python wasn’t elegant enough to let use codes like this:

Huh! I had to browse the django svn and try all the versions before I got it working. It was a tiring process, but I learned a lot of things! Here’s a quick tutorial for fellow Site5 users:

1) Get Virtualenv from here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv

2) Run this command:

3) The above command will create a virtual python environment for you in “~/bin”. You can now run Python and easy_install by typing:

4) Now get MySQL bindings for Python and the flup package for the FCGI dark spells 😉

5) Now we are ready to rock and roll with Django! Remember, Site5 has Python 2.4. The latest builds of Django might break. Please use the one I used in the following script:

6) Create some Symlinks:

7) Create a dedicated directory for django projects:

8 ) Lets create a project and an app:

9) Create django.fcgi with the following content:

10) Lets finish with a .htaccess to finish it off, should we? 🙂

3 replies on “Running django on Site5”

Great post man. Not sure why you don’t have more traffic. This saved me. Not sure why the SITE 5 folks can’t come up with a decent tutorial or guide for this. Really disappointing.

Probably obvious to those familiar with .tar.gz files and virtual envs, but I had to:
tar -xzf virtualenv-1.5.1.tar.gz
Before I could run python virtualenv.py ~ in step 2.

Stuck on step 5. Django doesn’t use subversion anymore and couldn’t get to work with github. Moving on to this tutorial, hope it works. http://www.codekoala.com/posts/installing-django-shared-hosting-site5/ Anyone get this working with site5? Site5’s docs are horrible with both the Django and Django in a virual env tutorials not working and syntax errors throughout.

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