If you want to mesh with django authentication, see:

<http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/apache_auth/>

(I haven't tried it yet, but I'm about to. :)

Last edited by shaunc (2006-10-15 05:16:29)

landslideinc wrote:

By the by,  Could you explain (or offer a link) to a newb such as myself what exactly a 'Symbolic Link' is?

You can think of symbolic links as shortcuts in the Linux world.

landslideinc wrote:

What would be the difference between doing what you suggested and setting up a static application to serve the files out of /media?

As things currently stand, to serve a Django application there are two instances of Apache doing the dirty work. One is server wide, everyone on the server uses it. The other is located in the same directory as your Django project and serves your Django application. However, the instance that serves your Django application isn't being accessed directly, it's proxied to from the server wide instance. This allows you to restart your Django application without affecting everyone else on the same server, as you'd only be restarting the instance that serves your Django application. With that said, in this set up using a symbolic link allows the server wide Apache instance to serve the admin media, which is faster because you would be cutting out the middle man, the instance that serves your Django application. It's recommended that you use one server to serve your Django application and another to serve your media, not just the admin media, which could be done in a similar fashion.

Hopefully that made sense.

Edit: This also applies to Mongrel and Rails, the only difference is that you'd set up a symbolic link to the public directory.

Last edited by IAIHMB (2006-10-20 19:40:47)

So if I have a Django project using some_path/template/project which contains directories like /images /javascript and /style:

some_path/template/project/images
some_path/template/project/javascript
some_path/template/project/style

Do I have to create applications to handle each subdirectory.  Or do I just point the symbolic link at some_path/template/project   ?

Not sure how all the mapping occurs in Apache?

Thanks,
-Paul

IAIHMB wrote:

You got it right the second time, symlinks handle subdirectories.

What about when you're doing this with Rails? The public directory in rails is the root of the web app, and it's served from / by the rails app with mongrel. When you create a symbolic link app pointing to the public directory, you can't also set it up to serve /, but that's where you need it to serve since all the static files are in there.

Ok.. I just did this and the control panel said there was an error and the team was notified.  Apart from that, a question: What is the url of the static files now?

Forgive me if the answer should somehow be obvious.. I am new.

Thanks
Robert

It's worth nothing that you'll need to add the following to your httpd.conf or else Django's instance of Apache will intercept all requests to /admin_media/:

<Location "/admin_media">
    SetHandler default
</Location>

Hope it helps.

You forgot the forward slash in the beginning, it should have been:

/home2/spyderfcs/lib/python2.4/django/contrib/admin/media

I've made the change for you and now it's working as expected.

Hope it helps.

I'm a little confused; I don't understand the difference between the two app types. Why would I want to use a "Symlink" app instead of a "Static" app to serve my static content (images, stylesheets, etc.)?

My view so far is that they are exactly the same thing, except the Static app creates a new folder, and Symlink has to point at an existing one.

Do I need to use the application control panel or can I simply set default handlers for all my static content and alias the directories in my Apache conf?

For example:

  <Location "/media">
    SetHandler none
  </Location>

  <Location "/img">
    SetHandler None
  </Location>

  <Location "/css">
    SetHandler None
  </Location>

  <Location "/js">
    SetHandler None
  </Location>

  <Location "/plugin">
    SetHandler None
  </Location>

  <LocationMatch "\.(jpg|gif|png|js|css|html|txt|php)$">
    SetHandler None
  </LocationMatch>

  Alias /media /home2/pkenjora/lib/python2.4/django/contrib/admin/media
  Alias /img /home2/pkenjora/webapps/django/arkayne/templates/images
  Alias /css /home2/pkenjora/webapps/django/arkayne/templates/css
  Alias /js /home2/pkenjora/webapps/django/arkayne/templates/js
  Alias /plugin /home2/pkenjora/webapps/django/arkayne/templates/plugin

Remi wrote:

Edit your website record and mount your "admin_media" app on "/media".

Could someone post an example/walkthrough of this, please? I thought I understood all the words in that sentence, but since my solution did not net me any nifty css on my admin, apparently I thought wrong. Thanks!

Err, thanks! By the way, the lawn's getting a little long, should you still be so motivated

drsanchez wrote:

I'm afraid I need a little more hand holding, though I think I'm almost there.  I have a very small Django site and when I visit one of my links I get a 413 error (request entity too large).  The link points to a very simple page, so I'm not asking the server to serve huge files or anything.

So I've been following this thread to serve my admin files from the main Apache server, thinking that would reduce the load.  In the control panel, I go to >Home>Sites and see two apps for my subdomain:

Code:

/: django  and
/media: admin_media.

The admin_media is the soft link described above.

In my settings.py file I have:

Code:

MEDIA_ROOT = '/home/donnes/webapps/django/media/'
MEDIA_URL = 'http://donnes.webfactional.com/media/'
ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/media/'

In my httpd.conf I have:

Code:

#  limit file uploads to 10 Mb
LimitRequestBody 10240000

<Location "/">
SetHandler python-program
    PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
    SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE donnes.settings
    PythonPath "['/home/donnes/webapps/django'] + sys.path"
    PythonDebug On
</Location>

<Location "/admin_media">
    SetHandler default
</Location>

<Location "/media/files">
    SetHandler none
</Location>

<LocationMatch "\.(jpg|gif|png)$">
    SetHandler None
</LocationMatch>

With this setup my admin page is seeing the css files correctly.  The "/media/files" is screwed up but I'll attack that later.  The 413 error comes up when I visit a login page, which in the urls.py is:
(r'^login/$', login), # where login is django.contrib.auth.views.login
There's nothing special about this login page, except that I'm using my own template.


Can anyone see where I'm going wrong?

It's hard to tell without looking at your setup. Can you tell us what your WebFaction username is or open a ticket in the support system ?
Also, can you give us one particular URL that doesn't work ?

Cheers,

Remi.