Django Posts
uWSGI and Django Secure Requests
A colleague and I ran into a frustrating situation this evening when transitioning a site from Apache and mod_wsgi to uWSGI. Django's request.is_secure() wasn't working correctly. After much Googling and shouting at the SSH console, we finally discovered the UWSGI_SCHEME uWSGI parameter. To fix the issue, we edited /etc/nginx/uwsgi_params (which ...
Continue readingPostgres 9 Streaming Replication and Django-Balancer
Over the past couple of weeks I've had the opportunity to dig in to Postgres 9's streaming replication. What I found was a relatively easy way to configure a system for basic replication with very impressive speed. Postgres's streaming replication is an enhancement to the log-shipping warm standby that was ...
Continue readingDjango Admin Customization Examples
I've worked on a couple of projects recently that required some customization of the Django admin. One of the things that I love about Django's built-in admin is that it is created with a very extensible class-based structure. Here are some of the ways I was able to customize the ...
Continue readingClass-based Views with Django-Baseviews
I've always loved the concept of class-based views because views often become repetitive. There are a lot of common operations in a view that work best when they are defined once and reused. Class inheritance, in my opinion, is the best way to keep views DRY and allow you to ...
Continue readingDjango on uWSGI and Nginx
I recently moved Pegasus News from Perlbal, Lighttpd, and Apache to Nginx and uWSGI. We balance the traffic between 3 physical servers, and the systems were struggling under the load even after weeks of Apache conf tweaking. We began having issues with excessively slow page loads, request timeouts, and intermittent ...
Continue readingSetting up a template_postgis on Lucid
I wasn't able to find instructions in the Django docs for setting up a template_postgis database with postgis-1.5 and Postgres 8.4 on Ubuntu Lucid (10.04). Below is what worked for me. GeoDjango installed via Ubuntu 10.04 packages #!/usr/bin/env bash POSTGIS_SQL_PATH=`pg_config --sharedir`/contrib createdb -E UTF8 template_postgis # Create the template spatial ...
Continue readingProvisioning a new Ubuntu server for Django
I've been a long-time satisfied user of Webfaction, but recently I've had a strong urge to move to VPS hosting so that I can have greater control over the environment. After some research, I went with Rackspace Cloud because of the incredibly cheap low-end options. My site doesn't use a ...
Continue readingUsing virtualenvwrapper to start processes and swap config files
I do my Django development work locally on OS X, so I have several different daemons installed on my machine. I used to keep Postgres, MySQL, lighttpd, memcached, and more set up to autostart and run continuously, but I didn't like the burden on performance (real or imagined). Also, I ...
Continue readingSnippet: Django Columns Filter
I was looking around for an easy way to split lists of items into columns in a way that the number of items in each column would be less than or equal to the number of items in the first column. This prevents a final column with several more items ...
Continue readingDjango-Reporter
This week I finished up the initial release of Django-Reporter, my first open-source project based on work I've done for my full-time employer, Pegasus News. At Pegasus we send daily, weekly, and monthly email reports out to several people. We have a quite complex codebase, so we need these reports ...
Continue readingCreating a Personal PyPi with Chishop
At Pegasus News, we run custom deploy scripts that use pip to read through a requirements.txt file and keep our virtualenvs up to date. We use quite a few 3rd-party Django apps that we pull from PyPi, along with several apps - both internal and 3rd-party - from Github and ...
Continue readingDRY Ajax Comments
Back in February, I posted an entry about adding Ajax functionality to the built-in comments app. I always intended to go back and improve this method, but didn't get the chance until now. Yesterday I decided to take another look, and I found a much better way of achieving this ...
Continue readingEasily Working With Pinax on Multiple Machines
I've been working on a project using the excellent Pinax platform, and I wanted to share some of the tricks I use to make it easier to work with. You can find out more about Pinax by visiting their site. I'm working with their recent 0.7beta3 release, so if you're ...
Continue readingDjango Dev, Test, and Prod Environments Revisited
Back in November, I posted a detailed entry about the environments I used to develop, test, and deploy my Django applications. Since then, I've made a lot of changes to my configuration that I feel have helped boost my productivity and effectiveness. I wanted to talk a little bit about ...
Continue readingAjax Django Comments With jQuery
NOTE: This example is outdated, and it violates the DRY principal. For a revised look at this topic, check out my more recent post here: DRY Ajax Comments I haven't posted here in awhile because of quite a few things going on in my personal and professional life lately. Things ...
Continue readingDjango's Dynamic URLs
One of the strengths of the Django framework is its emphasis on the Don't Repeat Yourself philosophy. From Wikipedia: "The philosophy emphasizes that information should not be duplicated, because duplication increases the difficulty of change, may decrease clarity, and leads to opportunities for inconsistency." This approach has many advantages in ...
Continue readingMy Django Development, Testing, and Production Environments
I've seen a lot of discussion lately about different strategies for developing and deploying Django applications. I wanted to share my current environment in the hopes that it might help someone new to Django or software development in general, and I was also hoping for some constructive criticism so that ...
Continue readingDjango-Picasso
I love Google's Picasa desktop application, and the ability to upload photos to the Picasa Web Albums site using the app is extremely useful. When I built my personal website using Django, I wanted a way to use Picasa Web Albums as a backend for my photos section so that ...
Continue readingDjango Colors for Eclipse
For a long time now, I've been using Gedit + plugins as an integrated development environment. I recently began using SVN to manage version control, however, and I wasn't able to find a good SVN client plugin for Gedit. I decided to see what else was out there, and after ...
Continue readingDjango with Apache and mod_auth_sspi
I recently finished up a project for a company intranet using Windows. Though Windows is not my favorite environment, Django works flawlessly there so it usually doesn't present many problems. One of the features needed for the site was automatic authentication through integrated Windows security. To achieve this, I used ...
Continue readingBrandon Konkle
I've been creating websites for over 10 years, and I've been using Django since early 2008. I focus on high quality, well-tested, maintainable code and reliable high-performance deployments. Web development is something that I am very excited about, and I love finding elegant and innovative ways to push web applications further.
