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.

Use “<strong>\c</strong>” anywhere in a search to ignore case (overriding your ignorecase or smartcase settings).
e.g. “<strong>/\cfoo</strong>” or “<strong>/foo\c</strong>” will match foo, Foo, fOO, FOO, etc.

Use “<strong>\C</strong>” anywhere in a search to force case matching.
e.g. “<strong>/\Cfoo</strong>” or “<strong>/foo\C</strong>” will only match foo.

You can set vim to ignore case on all your searches by running “<strong>:set ignorecase</strong>”.
If “<strong>ignorecase</strong>” is on, you can vim to ignore case on searches of only lowercase letters by running “<strong>:set smartcase</strong>”. (Searches with any capitalization or with “<strong>\C</strong>” will run a case-sensitive search.)

from Vim’s <strong>:help ignorecase</strong> and <strong>:help smartcase</strong>