Question

I’ve been developing in my own django environment for a while now using the manage.py runserver with no problems, but now that we’ve got a designer and a front-end developer needing to work on the project, I find myself at a loss as to what is the Best Practise for their environments.

I could ask them to setup their own python environment, but that’s asking an awful lot since they’re not Python people and they’re running Windows (my dev and the production environment are both Linux).

So instead, I’ve set them up on a remote server, the disk of which they can mount locally. However in this setup, I’m actually using different instances of manage.py runserver ip:port running in a screen instance. It doesn’t handle things like constant reloads very well (common for our designer) and it hangs from time to time due to the single-threaded nature of the dev server. I’d like to know how to set this up with Apache.

The problem with this of course is the staticfiles. Every time either of the aforementioned parties want to add or change a static file, they’d have to run manage.py collectstatic which just isn’t practical. I just don’t know any other way to do it though. All of the documentation I’ve found for using Apache is for a production environment, so… that’s why I’m here.

Answer 1

The answer to this one was a lot simpler than I thought it would be and I apologise for confusing those who responded. Basically all I wanted was a way to host our designer’s dev environment in something more stable than ./manage.py runserver ip:port in a screen session. I figured that there had to be a way to set something like this up for Apache but had no idea what it was.

Here’s what I got to work:

In your settings.py set your STATIC_URL and MEDIA_URL variables to relative URLs. In my case I used /static/ and /media/.

MEDIA_ROOT = PROJECT_ROOT + "/htdocs/media/"
MEDIA_URL = "/media/"
SERVE_STATIC = True
STATIC_ROOT = PROJECT_ROOT + "/htdocs/public/"
STATIC_URL = "/static/"

Configure Apache as you would if you didn’t have any static files at all. In other words, ignore the recommendations of the docs to use SetHandler None in a <Locaiton> block.

<VirtualHost *:80>

    WSGIScriptReloading On
    WSGIDaemonProcess someprocessname
    WSGIProcessGroup somegroupname
    WSGIApplicationGroup somegroupname
    WSGIPassAuthorization On

    WSGIScriptAlias / /path/to/config.wsgi

    ServerName somewhere.awesome.ca

    <Location "/">
        Order Allow,Deny
        Allow from all
    </Location>

    ErrorLog  /var/log/apache2/somewhere.awesome.ca.err
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/somewhere.awesome.ca.log combined

</VirtualHost>

• Lastly, you just have to follow the Django howto for serving staticfiles through Python at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/howto/static-files/#serving-other-directories

I hope this helps to point someone in the right direction in the future.