If you’re using uWSGI with XML support (this is its default), then it will
be requiring you to have libxml2 installed — or something similar that
provides xml-config. What you’ll find is some erratic behaviour (or
complete failure) when attempting to serve an application that is also
relying on libxml2, but a different version.
In my case, my original uWSGI was built with CentOS 5’s stock libxml2
library, but my Python application was using lxml, built with a custom
version of libxml2 (via Buildout with the z3c.recipe.staticlxml recipe, in case you
were curious). Because of these two versions being different, some odd
errors took place when lxml was being imported within my application.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the full details of these errors, but suffice
to say that lxml‘s XSLT functionality couldn’t be imported or else
used successfully without errors like lxml.etree.XSLTApplyError,
undefined symbol: xmlXPathCompiledEvalToBoolean, or:
File "xslt.pxi", line 596, in lxml.etree.XSLT.__call__ (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:139974)
lxml.etree.XSLTApplyError: Unregistered function
The errors were strange, and inconsistent as I tried to switch between
different versions of libxml2.
Installing uWSGI with the same libxml2
Good news! It’s easy to ensure that your uWSGI gets compiled using the same
libxml2. You just need to ensure that your PATH environment variable
is configured correctly before installing — so, you’ll need to ensure that
your custom xml-config is found before any others.
export PATH=/opt/buildout/parts/lxml/libxml2/bin:$PATH
#Do your uWSGI install
pip install uWSGI
#or
./bin/buildout
#etc
In my case, I’m using Buildout, so whilst the above path didn’t initially
exist, it gets created and installed during the Buildout process.
Alternatively, it is possible to use something like
collective.recipe.environment for Buildout to do this environment setting
for you, in case you are using Buildout.
I’m looking into getting the way I’m installing uWSGI with Buildout,
buildout.recipe.uwsgi, to accept customisation for a build option like
this. Stay tuned for more.
There are comments.