Question

I’m a bit confused with what is happening to run my django apps. When I use the command python manage.py runserver I don’t get the appropriate response from the server. However, when I use python2.6 manage.py runserver the server actually runs.

Can someone help me with this confusion and also suggest to me how I can simplify this problem? Ideally I don’t want different versions of python and only want to be able to type python manage.py runserver

Answer 1

Yes. It is fairly common. You can find out the location of an executable with which, and resolve symlinks with ls.

$ ls -l `which python`
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Jul 13 18:50 /usr/bin/python -> python2.6
$ ls -l `which python3`
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Jul 27 22:24 /usr/bin/python3 -> python3.1

On Debian and some other systems, you may need to resolve multiple symlinks.

$ ls -l `which nc`
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Oct  7 15:16 /bin/nc -> /etc/alternatives/nc
$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/nc
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Oct  7 15:16 /etc/alternatives/nc -> /bin/nc.openbsd

If you want to only type python and get the version you want, make an alias. Add a line to your .bashrc file (or wherever you keep such lines):

alias python=python2.6

Note that this will not affect scripts: if you run “python” in a script, it will get the old version, not an alias. Aliases are only for interactive use.