moosechips

Here’s some notes for installing Mezzanine on Dreamhost using virtualenv. This can be useful for installing on any server where you don’t have permissions to install python packages normally. There’s also notes here for how to set up Passenger to serve your site via Apache.

In Dreamhost panel, setup site for use with Passenger & ssh

Ssh into your Dreamhost server

Setup a Python virtualenv so you can install your own Python packages. Check the virtualenv pypi page for the latest virtualenv version (currently 1.6.3).

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-1.6.3.tar.gz
tar xzf virtualenv-1.6.3.tar.gz
python virtualenv-1.6.3/virtualenv.py $HOME/local
rm -rf virtualenv*
export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH

You probably want to add $HOME/local/bin to your path permanently. Add the export line to your ~/.bashrc file:

export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH

To make sure that you are using the virtualenv python, check that which python returns /home/youruser/local/bin/python and NOT /usr/bin/python.

Now you can install some Python packages

pip install --upgrade django mezzanine south paste

Create a mezzanine project

cd ~/site.com
# Name this project whatever you like.  I will use "mez"
mezzanine-project mez

Edit your settings in mez/local_settings.py. I will leave the sqlite database for testing. You could should probably create a mysql database for a real site though. Add these lines so Django knows where files are.

TIME_ZONE = 'America/Los_Angeles'
APP_URL = 'http://site.com'
## Note the leading and trailing slash here
#ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/admin_media/'
#MEDIA_ROOT= '/home/youruser/site.com/mez/site_media/'
#MEDIA_URL = 'http://site.com/site_media'

Setup your site with Passenger by creating a ~/site.com/passenger_wsgi.py file with the following:

import sys,os
# Force Passenger to run our virtualenv python
INTERP = "/home/youruser/local/bin/python"
if sys.executable != INTERP: os.execl(INTERP, INTERP, *sys.argv)
# Setup paths and environment variables
sys.path.append("/home/youruser/site.com")
sys.path.append("/home/youruser/site.com/mez")
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'mez.settings'
# Set the application
import django.core.handlers.wsgi
from paste.exceptions.errormiddleware import ErrorMiddleware
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()
# Use paste to display errors
application = ErrorMiddleware(application, debug=True)

Now setup the static files

ln -s ~/site.com/mez/site_media ~/site.com/public/site_media

Setup the database

cd ~/site.com/mez
python manage.py syncdb
# I think I initially had some errors running migrate, 
# but it worked the second time running migrate
python manage.py migrate

Restart the web server. Ordinarily you might do sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart. On Dreamhost you do this by touching tmp/restart.txt. (If the tmp directory doesn’t exist, mkdir ~/site.com/tmp)

touch ~/site.com/tmp/restart.txt

That should be it. Check to see if your site is up and running.

TODO’s: setup mysql, customize theme, etc

There’s alternative ways to handle the static files. The package django-staticfiles might be better? I haven’t tried it.

Redmine is a project management software. There’s existing documentation on the web about installing Redmine on Ubuntu, but much of it is out of date and confusing. Redmine is in the Ubuntu repos now so the installation is really quite simple.

sudo tasksel install lamp-server
sudo apt-get install redmine

Select sqlite for the database (redmine-sqlite is installed as a dependency by apt-get and it’s simpler to setup than mysql).

Now to configure the Apache bits.

sudo ln -s /usr/share/redmine/public /var/www/redmine
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger
sudo vim /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.conf

Add the PassengerDefaultUser www-data line to /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.conf. It should look like this:

<IfModule mod_passenger.c>
  PassengerDefaultUser www-data
  PassengerRoot /usr
  PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby
</IfModule>

Configure apache by adding these lines to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

<Directory /var/www/redmine>
    RailsBaseURI /redmine
    PassengerResolveSymlinksInDocumentRoot on
</Directory>

Configure email

cd /etc/redmine/default
sudo cp /usr/share/redmine/config/email.yml.example email.yml
sudo vim email.yml

If you want to use gmail, delete the default settings and uncomment the gmail section settings. Add the line

    enable_starttls_auto: true

after the tls: true line. (see Redmine Email Config for more info.)

Restart Apache (you will have to restart Apache after you make any redmine config file changes)

sudo service apache2 restart

Now see if your install worked. Try http://localhost/redmine or http://server.com/redmine. Login with username admin and password admin.

Update: Until Ubuntu updates to Redmine 1.0.4 (currently it installs 1.0.0), there is a bug where dates get displayed as {{count}} if you have the Ruby gem i18 v0.5.0 installed instead of v0.4.2. Quick fix:

sudo gem install i18n -v=0.4.2
sudo gem uninstall i18n -v=0.5.0