Ryan Kanno: The diary of an Enginerd in Hawaii

Since I haven’t put out a technical article in a while, this blog will explain how I’ve setup Dreamhost + Django + Subversion to play nicely together in a seamless development environment via a shared hosting provider. Hopefully - someone, somewhere can find this information useful and insightful in their own development environment.

The very first thing I did was unleash my first Django web application on Dreamhost. Thanks to an excellent tutorial from Jeff Croft, a detailed explanation about FastCGI contained within the Django documentation, and a few helpful pointers on the Dreamhost wiki, I was able to get my application deployed in a matter of a few hours.

You can check it out here!

However, after going through Jeff’s excellent tutorial, I still wasn’t completely satisfied with my Django deployment on Dreamhost. Something was missing. There wasn’t a seamless way to continue development on my home machine, deploy to a test environment, and still keep my live site intact. After all, I’m a true believer in the open source dictum of ‘release early, release often‘, and without a way to test my application on a live server, I wasn’t happy with my configuration management.

Ideally, I envisioned having a live web application (i.e. http://www.wegoeat.com/) and another url that I could deploy my beta releases to (i.e. http://beta.wegoeat.com/). From a configuration management standpoint, I would tag major release builds and to maintain that release over its life (via bug fixes, minor enhancements), I would create a branch of the tag. Thus, the live site would be updated from the branches directory, while the beta url would update from the trunk in my Subversion repository. So to summarize the ‘extra’ steps I did to ensure a smoother deployment cycle, I’ve conjured up the following action list.

1. The very first thing I did was follow Jeff’s tutorial - instead of creating a single directory in my django_projects directory, I created two. One was named ‘project_live’ and the other ‘project_beta’.
2. Next, I checked out the appropriate source files from the appropriate locations in my Subversion repository. The ‘project_live’ directory came from my branches directory and represents my ‘live’ site. The ‘project_beta’ directory came from the trunk and represents my ‘beta’ site. Obviously, the settings.py file for the Django applications as well as the configuration files for FastCGI were different according to the directories. Since my settings will probably be very different then your settings, I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader.
3. Note, as far as Dreamhost goes, I created two domain entries, one @ http://www.wegoeat.com that will host my live site, and another @ http://beta.wegoeat.com that will be my beta site.
4. I followed my own tutorial and created a post-commit hook to update the appropriate Dreamhost directories when I committed to the repository.

And voila! We’re done.

Now, I can develop on my home machine where I’ve checked out the trunk of my Subversion repository. Whenever I commit, the post-commit hook updates the project_beta directory on my Dreamhost account, and all the while, my live site is still functioning.

Stay tuned for my next blog where I discuss how to get Custom PHP + MediaWiki + EAccelerator playing nicely together on Dreamhost!