Peter's Blog

On a sudden whim I decided to try developing my new django blog on my windows laptop then uploading it to the server when it is working. The setup is slightly complex and I have only just set it up so lets try to describe it in detail.

• I already had the source in subversion so I installed tortoise svn a nice Windows svn client so I could access the source from windows, upload it into subversion when it was tested and read it back into the working image on the server.
• Also using Tortoise I extracted the latest django source onto the laptop.
• I set up the windows environment variables according to the django installation instructions.
• Because my templates directories are different under windows and ubuntu I put a conditional section in my settings module:

     1  import os
     2  
     3  if os.name != 'nt':
     4      TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
     5          # Put strings here, like "/home/html/django_templates".
     6          '/usr/local/lib/Django/django_templates',
     7      )
     8  else:
     9      TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    10          # Put strings here, like "/home/html/django_templates".
    11          'c:\\python24\\lib\\site-packages\\Django\\django_templates',
    12      )
  

• I installed the mysql client on the laptop, along with the appropriate version of MySQLdb
• I didn't want to run the database server on my laptop so I use an ssh tunnel to connect to the server: I have to run this in a command console while I am accessing the database:

  ssh -L 3306:127.0.0.1:3306 me@myserver.org
  

  For security the mysql server does not accept connections from outside the box it is running on, except via ssh. I am using the live database on the server and for development. I could create another instance of the database for testing.
• To get to files needed by the theme (e.g. style.css) I had to tweek my templates under windows such that they were loaded from the server using the full absolute url rather than a relative url. I didn't want to make django server them or put apache on my laptop.
• django_admin.py just worked, no problems.

Why did I do all this? Well I'm thinking again of using komodo as a development environment with a proper debugger. I don't have a lot of time to devote to all this, every minute is precious, so it will help to have productive tools available.