asked Jun 20 '11

After installing Askbot with (1) pip, (2) easy_install, or (3) untarring and running setup.py, you're supposed to run startforum (which resides in the same bin directory where the python executable is).

startforum is called a deployment script.

What exactly does it do?
Why is it needed? Why can't we just unzip Askbot in a directory and run it?

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Tomasz P. Szynalski has selected this answer as correct

answered Jun 20 '11

Evgeny

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http://askbot.org/

updated Jun 20 '11

Django can host multiple applications on the same site, where apps work like lego blocks - parts of the whole, for example - an online store and an askbot forum, etc.

All django sites have four project-wide files:

settings.py - the main settings configuration file
urls.py - main url configuration
__init__.py - often empty but needed for Python
manage.py - the hook allowing to run management commands

So what startforum script does - adds those files to a directory you select (and some more things specific to askbot.

If the directory is empty - the files will be just copied from askbot/setup_templates/, it won't overwrite any existing project files.

In the case you already have a django site you will not want to use startforum, because you don't want to just overwrite your existing settings.py.

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Thanks. Now I have a better idea of what startforum does and why it's necessary. Tomasz P. Szynalski (Jun 20 '11)

I think "startforum" is too generic a name. It is better to rename it into askbot_startforum or something more specific to avoid name clashes in /usr/bin path IMO mether (Jun 25 '11)

makes sense, thanks. It is best not to install into /usr/bin/path though, virtual environment would be better. Evgeny (Jun 25 '11)

virtual env is better for the user, yes but from a distribution maintainer perspective, I have to install it into /usr/bin unless I am mistaken about packaging mether (Jun 25 '11)

yes, we'll fix this, the global script names must be distinct enough. Evgeny (Jun 25 '11)

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Asked: Jun 20 '11

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The concept of "deployment"

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