Django – Going from development to production

I recently took my 4th year Systems Design Engineering project, which is a Django web application, from the development environment into a production environment and had quite a bit of difficulty, that could have been easily avoided if I had a tutorial to follow!

1. Hosting & Domain:
   The first thing is to either build a web host or purchase hosting from a company. I purchased hosting form Webfaction as they had a one click deployment for a Django application.  A domain name should also be purchased, I bought mine from GoDaddy for 10$.
2. Getting Setup on Webfaction:
   Webfaction takes a little while to setup your account~2-3 hours, when it is complete you will receive an e-mail and you can then login to their control panel. There are some resources that Webfaction offer to help you get setup, the first is a screencast and the other is a text guide.
3. Setting up the Database
   Once you are in the control panel area there are a few things you’ll want to do. Firstly you will need to add a database (if you have not done so), this can be done by clicking add new databse from the ‘Databases’ drop down menu.
4. Adding your domain name
   Under domains/websites select the domain link. Click on the add new button, and then enter your domain, for this tutorial we will assume it is ‘mysite.com’. When you add the domain be sure to enter in the subdomains field ‘www’ .
5. Setting up the application to serve the static media
   The next thing you will want to do is to add Static/CGI/PHP application to your website to serve the static media files (this is highly recommended). To do so go to the applications link under the domains/websites tab. Next click the add new button, name the application ‘media’ and select the app type as ‘Static/CGI/PHP’ and finally click the create button. Now you have to add the application to your domain, to do so click on the ‘websites’ link, and click the edit button for your website. Under subdomains select any that you would like to include, and then under site-apps ensure that you select the media app and set the url/path to ‘/media’. Click update, and you should be taken to the page as seen here:
   

   After site applications have been configured

6. Changes to your settings.py file:
   There are a few changes that need to be made to the settings.py file:
   DEBUG = False MEDIA_ROOT = ‘/home/username/webapps/media/
   MEDIA_URL= ‘/media/’

   Replace ‘username’ with the username that you selected for your webfaction account, now you are ready to upload your site. You will also need to change your database settings such that they match the new database created by webfaction.

7. Uploading your web applicaion
   To upload your web application, you will need to upload your ‘mysite’ application to the webfaction server. To do so you will need to download putty (an ssh tool) so that you can ssh into the host, the connection info as well as the username and password are provided by webfaction. Once you are logged in navigate to ‘/home/username/webapps/django/’ and replace the ‘myproject’ folder with your web application folder that you used for development. Once it has been uploaded you will need to tell apache where to locate the project, so naviagte to ‘/home/username/webapps/django/apache2/conf/’  and edit the httpd.conf file. You will need to change th PythonPath and SetEnvPythonPath “[‘/home/username/webapps/django’, ‘/home/username/webapps/django/lib/python2.5′] + sys.path”
   SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE  sitename.settings

   To setup your static media you will need to and another few lines of code to the same httpd.conf file:

   <Location “/media”>
   SetHandler None
   </Location>

   Save the file, and thats all you need to do in the apache folder. One last thing you will need to do is put your existing media into the media directory so that your static files are properly served by apache:
   /home/username/webapps/media

8. Setting up the Database :
   The first thing you will need to do is to get a dump of your current sql database, I personally used mysql, and got a dump with the following line of code:   mysqldump -u [username] -p [password] [databasename] > [backupfile.sql] . Now you need to navigate to your project on the webfaction host, /home/username/webapps/django/mysite/ and enter the db shell by entering: python2.5 manage.py dbshell . You should see a mysql command line promp where you can upload your mysql dump: mysql – u user_name -p your_password database_name < file_name.sql. Now  you have your database loaded up and you are ready to go.
9. Firing it Up:
   Everything is ready to go, the last step is to fire up your apache server, to so navigate to /home/username/webapps/django/apache2/ and enter the command bin/stop to stop it in case it was running, and then enter bin/start to start it up.
10. Pointing the domain name to the webfaction name servers:
    There actualy is one last thing to do, and that is on the domain side of things. You will have to go to the site where you purchased your domain name, and then change the nameservers to those at webfaction, which are as follows:
    ns1.webfaction.com
    ns2.webfaction.com
    ns3.webfaction.com
    ns4.webfaction.com
    Now you can navigate to http://mysite.com and it should come up, congrats your site is live!

There you have it, from development to production. Also remember if you make any changes to the settings.py file you will have to stop and then restart the apache server.  Hopefully this quick tutorial will help you get up and going, and if you have any other questions feel free to ask me!

–Steve

Revolutionary vs. Evolutionary Design – The 3rd Generation iPod Shuffle

I am sure many of you have seen the new 3rd generation iPod shuffle, as seen here. What really caught my attention was this line from the VP of product marketing:

“The new iPod shuffle is the world’s smallest music player and takes a revolutionary approach to how you listen to your music by talking to you, also making it the first iPod shuffle with playlists.”

What catches my attention is that they state that their new ‘revolutionary’ VoiceOver feature;  the ‘revolutionary’ VoiceOver feature will tell you the song titles, artists and playlist names. To me the fact that the shuffle talks to you is not a revolutionary change in the way people listen to music.I think they need a little lesson in what constitutes a revolutionary design and what really is an evolutionary design.

The terms evolutionary and revolutionary may seem very similar but there is an important difference, I’ll start by describing both. Evolutionary designs are ones that simply take a design to the next logical step, for example the first iPod nano with video support was an evolutionary design, it brought video to a small portable device but it did not really change how people watch videos. Revolutionary designs are those that fundamentally change how something is done, a classic example of a revolutionary design is the printing press, it fundamentally changed how information was desiminated and possibly led to the prevalence of literacy.

It should be obvious at this point how the new VoiceOver technology is not a revolutionary step in the way that we listen to music. The VoiceOver technology simply provides the same information that a visual display would, just through the auditory channel, thus not really changing how we listen to music.

To me, an example of a revolutionary design for a new music player would be one that could sense our moods and then auto create playlists based on them, or one whose controls could be operated based on our thoughts instead of the current tactile interface. Now obviously I know that these ideas are a little far fetched and currently infeasible, but one can always dream!

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Do you agree or disagree with the arguments made above? Let me know, I’d love to hear your thoughts.