Serving TileStache (or another app) using uWSGI against a web sub-directory

uWSGI is extremely promising as an application server given its huge range of options and supported platforms.  For me, however, just getting something seemingly simple up and running successfully was relatively confusing. I’d like to contribute to the documentation when I can, but thought a dedicated page about TileStache as a specific application (and associated configuration) was warranted. It does make more sense now, thankfully.

I want to serve my TileStache application at http://mydomain.com/tiles (taking careful note of the sub-directory present). I’ve chosen an INI-style configuration for my instance and here’s what the …

in Python · Fri 01 June 2012

mr.scripty - my new best friend

If you’re working with Buildout, then check out mr.scripty, a fantastic Buildout recipe that allows you to use Python code in functions within its options.  This means that - in the few instances I’ve used it so far - have conditional statements regarding effectively anything.

In the two examples I added to the source documentation, I go and configure download links based upon architecture and separately, configure some (Java) environment variables based upon which directories exist (eg to handle different Linux distributions that might be running). This is only the start, but it’s a fantastic one.

Amazing I …

in Python · Fri 24 February 2012

ImportError: No module named BeautifulSoup

Had this issue when you’ve been trying to run something like Funnelweb, and you hit an ImportError for BeautifulSoup?  You’re definitely not alone, because I just hit the same issue.  The answer is simple — just ensure that you don’t use BeautifulSoup 4 or above (this is still beta) — it uses a different namespace, specifically bs4. Thus, whilst you might have the BeautifulSoup egg satisfying your dependencies, any imports of this package are going to fail.

For me, I’m using buildout, so I just pinned my version of BeautifulSoup thusly:

[buildout]
...
versions = versions

[versions]
BeautifulSoup = 3.2 …

in Python · Fri 26 August 2011

Can’t run Plone/Zope buildout on Ubuntu 11.04 after upgrade from 10.10

After upgrading from Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) to Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), you’ll probably find that if you’re running a Plone 4 buildout where you need to upgrade the Plone version, that compilation of Zope will fail. The output will look something like this:

Getting distribution for 'Zope2==2.12.17'.
In file included from src/AccessControl/cAccessControl.c:51:0:
include/ExtensionClass/ExtensionClass.h:83:20: fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
error: Setup script exited with error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1
An error occured when trying …

in IT, Linux, Software · Wed 11 May 2011

Python eggs and missing files (like ‘docs’)

This is pretty trivial (and trivial to fix), but I’m chronicling it for my knowledge as much as anyone else’s.  The issue is that a given Python egg is missing some form of files, most commonly the ‘docs’ directory in my experience, because the build wasn’t configured correctly.

The error goes somewhat like this:

Getting distribution for 'my.theme'.
error: docs/HISTORY.txt: No such file or directory
An error occured when trying to install my.theme 1.5.0. Look above this message for any errors that were output by easy_install.

The solution is simple: just …

in Python · Thu 06 January 2011

Plone/Zope: Truncating a Data.fs back to a certain date/time

Okay. So, anyone out here who’s listening — particularly those overly-enthusiastic users — don’t try to recursively wget your Plone site (or other CMS, for that matter) whilst you’re logged in with an account that can make edits. It will lead to a very bad situation where your site administrator and technical team need to step in and fix your mistakes. For the uninitiated, a loose recursive wget (when logged in with some degree of Edit rights) will hit every link that’s on your pages, and I mean in the (X)HTML source. For a Plone site, this …

in Plone · Tue 20 July 2010

Plone: running Plone without copies of blobs

Having a bad day? Just bombed your only copies of some files that you’d been storing as blobs together with your Plone database? Maybe you had the blobs stored incorrectly on your Zeo client, rather than the server, and then in a hasty effort to free some space (due to an on-going issue with blobs eating HDD space), deleted them. Whoops..they’re gone and their references are still in your Plone database. Or, in a less disastrous situation, maybe you just want to be able to run your Plone database without needing lost blobs? Read on.The suggestion …

in Plone · Tue 13 July 2010

Plone/Zope: Using LDAPUserFolder with posixGroups

Due to various reasons, the Products.LDAPUserFolder package available for Plone and Zope doesn’t support POSIX groups.  The ‘official’ (ish) reason for this is because of the fact that these groups don’t store full distinguished names (DNs) for members.  It makes some degree of sense, because a user ID like ‘david.test’ isn’t strictly unique.  On the other hand, these types of groups are quite common in LDAP implementations; not supporting them without giving it at least half a shot to find the user seems a bit strange.

Here’s where a quick patch steps in. Thanks …

in Plone · Thu 03 June 2010

Virtualenv, Python 2.4, Plone 3.x and Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04)

These titles of my posts just keep getting longer and longer.  For those of you paying close attention (I know who you are), this is the next in my series of getting the above-mentioned tools working together. Previously, it was Centos 5.x, Jaunty (9.04), Karmic (9.10) and now Lucid (10.04).  Only subtly different, each of this distributions has pretty much called for its own post on the matter of getting a working Plone 3.x / Python 2.4 virtualenv installation going.  So, here goes this time around.

in Plone · Wed 12 May 2010

Installing Python 2.4 on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

Whoops.  No one sent me the memo that Python 2.4 support was being removed entirely from the latest version of Ubuntu, 10.04 Lucid Lynx.  To be fair, I was presented with the message that ‘these outdated packages will be removed’ and in that list was python2.4.  I made the unfortunate assumption that this just mean the package was outdated (which it certainly is) and I’d have the ability to install it again in Lucid.  There were a number of different packages on the list and in order to save time, I let the updater remove them …

in Linux · Tue 04 May 2010