uWSGI and libxml2 conflicts (aka Installing uWSGI with a custom libxml2)

// under uWSGI libxml2 xml-config

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.

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