How to setup AskBot with virtualenv?

answered 2011-05-30 02:23:30 -0500

This post is a wiki. Anyone with karma >100 is welcome to improve it.

updated 2011-05-30 02:27:23 -0500

DealsVistaCom
127 ● 9 ● 5 ● 15
http://www.dealsvista.com...

My rough step to step guide

There are still security risks and other non-functional settings. Please help to make it better. Currently, that is the only way for me to avoid 500 internal server error. Assuming my website name is howtox.com

First,

cd /home/deals/howtox    
virtualenv --no-site-package virtpy    
source virtpy/bin/activate

Then, I followed the instruction here:

http://askbot.org/doc/install.html

pip install askbot

Then,set up mysql db user and pass, and then

create database howtox DEFAULT CHARACTER SET UTF8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Then,

startforum forum
python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py migrate askbot
python manage.py migrate django_authopenid

The key is the order of sys.path in django.wsgi file. An "egg-cache" dir is also needed. The following file is working:

import os
import sys

# prev sys path
prev_sys_path = list(sys.path)

import site
site.addsitedir('/home/deals/howtox/virtpy/lib/python2.6/site-packages')

# Avoid error msg
import os
os.environ['PYTHON_EGG_CACHE']='/var/www/howtox.com/egg-cache'

current_directory = os.path.dirname(__file__)
parent_directory = os.path.dirname(current_directory)
module_name = os.path.basename(current_directory)

sys.path.append(parent_directory)
sys.path.append(current_directory)

# reorder sys.path so new dir show up first
new_sys_path = [p for p in sys.path if p not in prev_sys_path]
for item in new_sys_path:
    sys.path.remove(item)
sys.path[:0] = new_sys_path

os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = '%s.settings' % module_name
import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

In the end, I have the following directory setup:

- /home/deals/howtox
-- forum (django.wsgi is under this dir)
-- virtpy
- /var/www/howtox.com
-- egg-cache

To make it complete. I am also throwing in my apache config file - /etc/apache2/sites-available/howtox.com. Please note this is incomplete (static file is not working), but at least it is not giving 500.

<VirtualHost 68.68.99.163:80>
    ServerName howtox.com
    ServerAlias www.howtox.com
    ServerAdmin help@howtox.com

    #Rewrite URL
#   RewriteEngine On
#   RewriteCond %{HTTP_POST} ^www.howtox.com
#   RewriteRule (.*) http://howtox.com$1 [R=301,L]

    #Log
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/howtox_com_error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/howtox_com_access.log combined

    #Setup mod_wsgi
    WSGIScriptAlias / /home/deals/howtox/forum/django.wsgi

    <Directory /home/deals/howtox/forum>
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Another random tip:

sudo doesn't bring the virtualenv with it! You have to su first, and then enter the virtualenv, and then do python manage.py bla bla