Django community: Community blog posts RSS
This page, updated regularly, aggregates Community blog posts from the Django community.
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Getting Paid in Django with Pin Payments
For a long time, it's been tough to accept payments online in Australia. Of course we had PayPal, but we never got any great tools like Stripe, like our peers in the US. Recently, Pin Payments started as an "Australian version of Stripe". They're still getting started, but they're open for business - so I wrote a small Django library called django-pinpayments to make it easier to use Pin within your Django app. -
Getting Paid in Django with Pin Payments
For a long time, it's been tough to accept payments online in Australia. Of course we had PayPal, but we never got any great tools like Stripe, like our peers in the US. Recently, Pin Payments started as an "Australian version of Stripe". They're still getting started, but they're open for business - so I wrote a small Django library called django-pinpayments to make it easier to use Pin within your Django app. -
Getting Paid in Django with Pin Payments
Payments in Australia are controlled by the so-called "big four" banks, and it's been difficult for a long time for startups to get merchant facilities to process credit cards online. Accounts cost hundreds of dollars per month, with high transaction costs and minimum transaction volumes thrown in. We watched with teary eyes as companies such as Stripe launched and made it easy for developers to process credit cards, and kept struggling with the PayPal "API" with hope that one day we'd see Stripe in Australia. I was excited, then, to see that Pin Payments have just publicly launched in Australia. They're currently offering a $9/month account fee, which isn't free but it's certainly ideal for small companies. After June 2013 this will jump to $50/month, so it seems to make sense to sign up now if you've got any medium-term plans. Like Stripe, Pin offer a JavaScript Library for processing payments on your page without ever handling credit card details. This makes it much quicker and easier to implement. Because I process payments in multiple places on WhisperGifts, I needed a reusable way to render the payment form and process the payment in a worker queue. The resulting code has ... -
Celery with RabbitMQ 3.1.0 on Webfaction
A while ago Mark Liu wrote about setting up django-celery on a Webfaction host. I took the tutorial and matched it to the current version of RabbitMQ that is 3.1.0. Please read this article entirely before installing anything! Basically follow Mark's tutorial and install Erlang as well as RabbitMQ but use the current RabbitMQ binary *.tar.gz from the download page. Attention: Depending on what applications you are already running on Webfaction, the 256MB RAM plan may be insufficient to run Celery and RabbitMQ and Erlang. You can give it a try, for me it did not work, I added some more memory to my plan. Monitor your memory usage while installing. I'm using the following script to do so (replace the [username] with your username): # memory_top.sh # lists memory usage for given user every 5 seconds while true do ps -U [username] --no-headers -o rss | (tr '\n' +; echo 0) | bc sleep 5 done Do not configure rabbitmq-server and the rabbitmq-env file as written. Instead do the following (I extracted RabbitMQ to \$HOME/rabbitmq/rabbitmq_server-3.1.0 and will use this paths): Edit \$HOME/rabbitmq/rabbitmq_server-3.1.0/sbin/rabbitmq-defaults: ... # comment these lines: #CONFIG_FILE=${SYS_PREFIX}/etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq #LOG_BASE=${SYS_PREFIX}/var/log/rabbitmq #MNESIA_BASE=${SYS_PREFIX}/var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia # add these lines: CONFIG_FILE=/home/[username]/rabbitmq/rabbitmq_server-3.1.0/sbin/ LOG_BASE=/home/[username]/logs/user/rabbitmq # create this ... -
Celery with RabbitMQ 3.1.0 on Webfaction
A while ago Mark Liu wrote about setting up django-celery on a Webfaction host. I took the tutorial and matched it to the current version of RabbitMQ that is 3.1.0. Please read this article entirely before installing anything! Basically follow Mark's tutorial and install Erlang as well as RabbitMQ but use the current RabbitMQ binary *.tar.gz from the download page. Attention: Depending on what applications you are already running on Webfaction, the 256MB RAM plan may be insufficient to run Celery and RabbitMQ and Erlang. You can give it a try, for me it did not work, I added some more memory to my plan. Monitor your memory usage while installing. I'm using the following script to do so (replace the [username] with your username): # memory_top.sh # lists memory usage for given user every 5 seconds while true do ps -U [username] --no-headers -o rss | (tr '\n' +; echo 0) | bc sleep 5 done Do not configure rabbitmq-server and the rabbitmq-env file as written. Instead do the following (I extracted RabbitMQ to \$HOME/rabbitmq/rabbitmq_server-3.1.0 and will use this paths): Edit \$HOME/rabbitmq/rabbitmq_server-3.1.0/sbin/rabbitmq-defaults: ... # comment these lines: #CONFIG_FILE=${SYS_PREFIX}/etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq #LOG_BASE=${SYS_PREFIX}/var/log/rabbitmq #MNESIA_BASE=${SYS_PREFIX}/var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia # add these lines: CONFIG_FILE=/home/[username]/rabbitmq/rabbitmq_server-3.1.0/sbin/ LOG_BASE=/home/[username]/logs/user/rabbitmq # create this ... -
Celery with RabbitMQ 3.1.0 on Webfaction
A while ago Mark Liu wrote about setting up django-celery on a Webfaction host. I took the tutorial and matched it to the current version of RabbitMQ that is 3.1.0. Please read this article entirely before installing anything! Basically follow Mark's tutorial and install Erlang as well as RabbitMQ but use the current RabbitMQ binary *.tar.gz from the download page. Attention: Depending on what applications you are already running on Webfaction, the 256MB RAM plan may be insufficient to run Celery and RabbitMQ and Erlang. You can give it a try, for me it did not work, I added some more memory to my plan. Monitor your memory usage while installing. I'm using the following script to do so (replace the [username] with your username): # memory_top.sh # lists memory usage for given user every 5 seconds while true do ps -U [username] --no-headers -o rss | (tr '\n' +; echo 0) | bc sleep 5 done Do not configure rabbitmq-server and the rabbitmq-env file as written. Instead do the following (I extracted RabbitMQ to \$HOME/rabbitmq/rabbitmq_server-3.1.0 and will use this paths): Edit \$HOME/rabbitmq/rabbitmq_server-3.1.0/sbin/rabbitmq-defaults: ... # comment these lines: #CONFIG_FILE=${SYS_PREFIX}/etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq #LOG_BASE=${SYS_PREFIX}/var/log/rabbitmq #MNESIA_BASE=${SYS_PREFIX}/var/lib/rabbitmq/mnesia # add these lines: CONFIG_FILE=/home/[username]/rabbitmq/rabbitmq_server-3.1.0/sbin/ LOG_BASE=/home/[username]/logs/user/rabbitmq # create this ... -
Water software and python
Weird link I got from a colleague this evening: some Dutch ICT awards were awarded this week. The link is in Dutch, but trust me if I say that the two (to me) relevant awards were awarded to Python (as a fantastic computer language) and to hydrologic (a Dutch water+ict company, for their water software). For me, the weirdness is three-step process: Ok, an award for Python is nice! Almost all our (Nelen & Schuurmans) software is written in Python. And virtually all of it is open source. Just look at github: https://github.com/nens/ and especially https://github.com/lizardsystem/ . Lots of Python and Django. The water software award goes to a closed source Microsoft shop. We (Nelen & Schuurmans) are the perfect combination of water software and open source Python. We're a water consultancy company. And a successful one, too. Lots of great projects. Most of them centered around something called Lizard (http://lizard.net for the mostly-Dutch business language stuff, http://lizard.org for the English IT stuff). Lots of partners working on and with it. It is a real platform with every partner putting in ideas and expertise. Most of the actual programming happens at our place, to be fair, at the moment. But... ... -
Introducing Salmon
Click here to see this post in it's natural habitat and to watch and leave comments. Over the years, I’ve used a lot of server monitoring systems. Big enterprisey ones like Zabbix, Zenoss, and Hyperic, smaller ones like munin and monit, stuff in the middle like Graphite, and hosted solutions like New Relic. Throughout the search, I never found one that hit the sweet spot for me. They were either too complicated and required too much setup upfront or too limited in what they had to offer. Like any good developer frustrated with the tools available, I set off on building my own. The result (still in its infancy) is Salmon. Its aim is to be a simple, yet powerful (enough) server monitoring and alerting system. Salmon itself is a simple project, but takes advantage of some great open source libraries for much of its advanced functionality. Salt Salt is the new kid on the block for server configuration management (think Chef and Puppet). Billing it as a configuration management tool is underselling it though. It’s really a remote execution framework. I hadn’t wrapped my head around this until a chat with a few of the guys from SaltStack at ... -
Introducing Salmon
Over the years, I’ve used a lot of server monitoring systems. Big enterprisey ones like Zabbix, Zenoss, and Hyperic, smaller ones like munin and monit, stuff in the middle like Graphite, and hosted solutions like New Relic. Throughout the search, I never found one that hit the sweet spot for me. They were either too complicated and required too much setup upfront or too limited in what they had to offer. Like any good developer frustrated with the tools available, I set off on building my own. The result (still in its infancy) is Salmon. Its aim is to be a simple, yet powerful (enough) server monitoring and alerting system. Salmon itself is a simple project, but takes advantage of some great open source libraries for much of its advanced functionality. Salt Salt is the new kid on the block for server configuration management (think Chef and Puppet). Billing it as a configuration management tool is underselling it though. It’s really a remote execution framework. I hadn’t wrapped my head around this until a chat with a few of the guys from SaltStack at PyCon this year. Salt is a perfect tool for stats collection on remote servers. It offers ... -
Simple Job Queues with django_rq
Simple Job Queues with django_rq The de facto solution for job queues with background workers is Celery and RabbitMQ, but it is not the right fit for every project. RQ is an alternative to Celery, and while not as featureful, does provide a lightweight solution that makes it easy to ... -
Introducing Salmon
Over the years, I’ve used a lot of server monitoring systems. Big enterprisey ones like Zabbix, Zenoss, and Hyperic, smaller ones like munin and monit, stuff in the middle like Graphite, and hosted solutions like New Relic. Throughout the search, I never found one that hit the sweet spot for me. They were either too complicated and required too much setup upfront or too limited in what they had to offer. Like any good developer frustrated with the tools available, I set off on building my own. -
Deploying django using docker
In this blog post we'll take a look at Docker and discuss ways to deploy django using docker. About Docker: Docker is a tool that helps you manage lxc containers and images. You can create an image, launch container from the existing image, attach to a running container, and generally play around with the containers. The most important benefit of using docker and containers in general is that you have a clean, hygeinic and portable runtime enivorment for your app. This means you don't have to worry about missing dependecies, packages and other pain points during subsequent deployments. You can take a snapshot of a running container and restore it again when required. Plus, each app runs in it's own isolated container so you can have various versions of libraries and other dependecies for each app without worrying about it's effect on other apps. Coming from the python world where virtualenv is ubiqitous, it's a huge relief to me that there's such a better and cleaner solution. Note: Docker is still under heavy development. It should not yet be used in production. Check the repo for recent progress. To know more about docker and install it, go to the "Getting ... -
Core Concepts of Django ModelForms
In my opinion, the concepts behind Django's model forms can be listed in just six (6) bullets. The bullets I've marked in bold at the top are the topic of this blog post, while the two of these that were covered in a previous blog post on Django forms are at bottom of my list. ModelForms render Model fields as HTML. ModelForms select validators based off of Model field definitions. ModelForms don't have to display/change all available fields. ModelForms save dictionaries to SQL tables. Forms are "just" Python constructs. (covered previous) Forms validate Python dictionaries. (covered previous) ModelForms render Model fields as HTML. If I create a Django model: # myapp/models.py from django.db import models class MyModel(models.Model): title = models.CharField(max_length=100) Then attach it to a ModelForm: # myapp/forms.py from django import forms from .models import MyModel class MyModelForm(forms.ModelForm): class Meta: model = MyModel I can render it in a template, or for better clarity in this post, the Python REPL: >>> from myapp.forms import MyModelForm >>> mf = MyModelForm() >>> mf <__main__.MyForm object at 0x1023c8bd0> >>> print(mf) <tr><th><label for="id_title">Title:</label></th> <td><input id="id_title" name="title" maxlength="100" type="text" /></td></tr> ModelForms select validators based off of Model field definitions. One of the nice things about ... -
Core Concepts of Django ModelForms
In my opinion, the concepts behind Django's model forms can be listed in just six (6) bullets. The bullets I've marked in bold at the top are the topic of this blog post, while the two of these that were covered in a previous blog post on Django forms are at bottom of my list. ModelForms render Model fields as HTML. ModelForms select validators based off of Model field definitions. ModelForms don't have to display/change all available fields. ModelForms save dictionaries to SQL tables. Forms are "just" Python constructs. (covered previous) Forms validate Python dictionaries. (covered previous) ModelForms render Model fields as HTML. If I create a Django model: # myapp/models.py from django.db import models class MyModel(models.Model): title = models.CharField(max_length=100) Then attach it to a ModelForm: # myapp/forms.py from django import forms from .models import MyModel class MyModelForm(forms.ModelForm): class Meta: model = MyModel I can render it in a template, or for better clarity in this post, the Python REPL: >>> from myapp.forms import MyModelForm >>> mf = MyModelForm() >>> mf <__main__.MyForm object at 0x1023c8bd0> >>> print(mf) <tr><th><label for="id_title">Title:</label></th> <td><input id="id_title" name="title" maxlength="100" type="text" /></td></tr> ModelForms select validators based off of Model field definitions. One of the nice things about ... -
Serving files if they exist or fallback to wsgi app
We want to achieve this routing scheme [2]: /anything => static file, if it exists ! / => the wsgi app For some reason this isn't as straightforward as in Nginx. Example [1]. With Apache you have to employ mod_rewrite, which is not straightforward if you're not writing rewrite rules and conditions all day long :) The first this is to alias the wsgi app to a different location than the root: WSGIScriptAlias /wsgi /path/to/the/app.wsgi We need to make the location of the static files the DocumentRoot: DocumentRoot /path/to/static/files <Directory /path/to/static/files> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Directory> And now the mod_rewrite dance: RewriteEngine on Set some conditions: if the request path is not a filename: RewriteCond /path/to/static/files%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f And not a directory: RewriteCond /path/to/static/files%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d Optional, exempt any other special locations (I have an Alias /media): RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/media And finally the rewrite rule: RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /wsgi$1 [PT,L] PT - Take the request to go through the URL mapping machinery (so Alias, WSGIScriptAlias etc are applied again for the resulting URL) L - Stops processing any other RewriteRule for this request. This is implied by PT but it put it there in case I forget this :). The full configuration: ... -
Serving files if they exist or fallback to wsgi app
We want to achieve this routing scheme [2]: /anything => static file, if it exists ! / => the wsgi app For some reason this isn't as straightforward as in Nginx. Example [1]. With Apache you have to employ mod_rewrite, which is not straightforward if you're not writing rewrite rules and conditions all day long :) The first this is to alias the wsgi app to a different location than the root: WSGIScriptAlias /wsgi /path/to/the/app.wsgi We need to make the location of the static files the DocumentRoot: DocumentRoot /path/to/static/files <Directory /path/to/static/files> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Directory> And now the mod_rewrite dance: RewriteEngine on Set some conditions: if the request path is not a filename: RewriteCond /path/to/static/files%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f And not a directory: RewriteCond /path/to/static/files%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d Optional, exempt any other special locations (I have an Alias /media): RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/media And finally the rewrite rule: RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /wsgi$1 [PT,L] PT - Take the request to go through the URL mapping machinery (so Alias, WSGIScriptAlias etc are applied again for the resulting URL) L - Stops processing any other RewriteRule for this request. This is implied by PT but it put it there in case I forget this :). The full configuration: ... -
Using Sentry to log exceptions and logging messages from Django projects
sentry is something like an logs aggregation application. It can be used to log exceptions and other log messages from Django or other framework/programming languages (including JavaScript). Instead of sending a lot of emails to a project admin Django will send them to Sentry which will aggregate them and present in a readable form. Sentry is actually a Django application that can be launched setup on your local computer - perfect for testing. In this article I'll show you how to run Sentry on your local computer (basic setup) and how to configure Django and other parts of the Python code for optimal Sentry logging results. -
Making your Django app more pluggable
This blog post is about ways of doing things in your Django app, and pitfalls to avoid, so your app is easier to plug in to other sites. Introduction One of the most enticing promises of Django is that you’ll be able to add features to your site by just downloading apps and plugging them in. That’s one of the many reasons we use Django here at Caktus: we can build useful web sites for our clients more quickly by not having to re-invent the same building blocks all the time, and focusing on the unique value-add for each client. This is also one of the attractions of building and releasing open-source Django apps: they’re easy for other people to use, and having other people use your code is very satisfying. But Django apps don’t become easily pluggable automatically, and it’s easy to do things in a way that make it much harder for other sites to use an app. A book could be written about this topic. This post just gives examples of some areas that can cause problems, and might stimulate some thought when designing your app. Not everything needs to be an app Does your package have ... -
Using mysql load data infile with django
Using mysql load data infile with django -
Using Fabric to update a remote svn checkout with ssh public key authentication
Using Fabric to update a remote svn checkout with ssh public key authentication -
Allow squid/mod_wsgi to pass the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION header to Apache
Allow squid/mod_wsgi to pass the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION header to Apache -
Django "view-permissions" for related objects
Django "view-permissions" for related objects -
Nested resources in Tastypie
Nested resources in Tastypie -
Custom choices in Django admin
Custom choices in Django admin -
RestORM - The client side of REST
RestORM - The client side of REST
