The Github Repo of My Personal Website JOSHUA's BLOG

Joshua-s-Blog

I start up this repo to manage the code of my personal website JOSHUA’s BLOG, which is set up on WebFaction and implemented by Django and several other packages. The repository is here.

In addition to manage my own code, viewers can also use this project to learn how to build a website using Django. I will write down the works that need to be done to use these code.

Finally, welcome to visit JOSHUA’s BLOG.

Environment

Ubuntu 14.04. Though Ubuntu 16.04 has been released for a while, I am still using an older LTS release. I am not sure the following instruction can work fine on Ubuntu 16.04.

Apache 2.4. I chose Apache 2.4 because my deploy server is powered by Apache 2.4. The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows.

WSGI 1.5. WSGI is the Web Server Gateway Interface. It is a specification that describes how a web server communicates with web applications, and how web applications can be chained together to process one request.

Django 1.7.1. Hmm… I am still using an ancient version of Django. It is also because I wish I could have an exactly same developing environment with the deploy one. Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Built by experienced developers, it takes care of much of the hassle of Web development, so you can focus on writing your app without needing to reinvent the wheel. It’s free and open source.

Instructions

Install Apache 2.4

Apache can be installed easily using the apt-get.

sudo apt-get install apache2

. Then we can use

apacheclt -v

to check the version of Apache and its success of installation.

Install mod_wsgi 1.5

mod_wsgi can be installed using Pip, which can be installed using

sudo apt-get install python-pip

.

install mod_wsgi using

pip install mod_wsgi

. I met an error of

missing Apache httpd server packages.

here. I bypassed this error by

sudo apt-get install apache2-mpm-worker apache2-dev

.

download mod_wsgi-3.5.tar.gz from here.

extract files from the package using

tar xvfz mod_wsgi-3.5.tar.gz

.

enter the directory

cd cd mod_wsgi-3.5

.

config by

./configure

make

sudo make install

Install Django 1.7.1

Install Django using command

pip install Django==1.7.1

. To verify its installation, try to

import django

in python console. If no error is raised, then the installation is successful.

Set up joshua_blog project with Apache

Note: after download the project, you should change the folder name to

joshua_blog

.

add the following code to the file of

/etc/apache2/apache2.conf

LoadModule wsgi_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_wsgi.so
WSGIScriptAlias / /home/joshua/CODE/PYTHON/joshua_blog/joshua_blog/wsgi.py
Alias /media/ /home/joshua/CODE/PYTHON/joshua_blog/media/
Alias /static/ /home/joshua/CODE/PYTHON/joshua_blog/static/

<Directory /home/joshua/CODE/PYTHON/joshua_blog/static>
Require all granted
</Directory>

<Directory /home/joshua/CODE/PYTHON/joshua_blog/media>
Require all granted
</Directory>

<Directory /home/joshua/CODE/PYTHON/joshua_blog/joshua_blog>
<Files wsgi.py>
Require all granted
</Files>
</Directory>

WSGIPythonPath /home/joshua/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages
ServerName localhost:80

add the following code to the file of

joshua_blog/joshua_blog/wsgi.py

import sys
sys.path.append("/path/joshua_blog/")

in my case, the path is

/home/joshua/CODE/PYTHON/

.

restart apache server by

sudo service apache2 restart

Install dependency modules

Coming here, we have set up the environment. But when we visit

127.0.0.1

, we found that the web server return 500 error. It is because several modules needed by joshua_blog are of need to be installed manually. We can see which modules are missed in the file of

/var/log/apache2/error.log

. Next we will see how to install these modules.

django-bootstrap. The author suggests to install this app using

pip install django-bootstrap

, but the latest version of the app requires Django>=1.8. Thus we need to download django-bootstrap from 6.x.x branch, which can be found here. Extract the package and enter its directory. Install by

python setup.py install

.

django-filemanager. The installation instruction can be found here.

django-disqus. Install by

pip install django-disqus

. A brief introduction in Chinese can be found here

unidecode. Install by

pip install unidecode

.

markdown2. Install by

pip install markdown2

. A brief introduction in Chinese can be found here.

At last we can visit our website at 127.0.0.1. We can log in as the supervisor using the username of

joshua

and the password of

joshua

. We may meet other issues:

Here maybe we will get an error message reading “attempt to write a readonly database”. We should change its mode by

chmod 666 db.sqlite3

.

Then another error comes as “unable to open database file”. Then we should change the owner of the whole project

sudo chown www-data joshua_blog

.