links for 2009-11-20


  • At work we have to manage a ton of Django based sites. Just for our World Company sites, we have over 50 different settings files, and this doesn't take into account the sites that we host for other clients. At this size it becomes basically impossible to test each site in a browser when you push things to production. To solve this problem I have written a very basic server description tool. This allows you to describe sites (settings file, python path, url, etc.) and servers.

    You can see a basic version running for my personal site. It is super barebones, but it should give you an idea of what exactly is possible.

    The source is available on Github. A 0.1 release will be uploaded to Pypi soon, after a few of the blemishes have been worked out. I would like to thank Nathan Borror for the design parts that are pretty :)

  • Python has a debugger, which is available as a module called pdb (for “Python DeBugger”, naturally!). Unfortunately, most discussions of pdb are not very useful to a Python newbie — most are very terse and simply rehash the description of pdb in the Python library reference manual. The discussion that I have found most accessible is in the first four pages of Chapter 27 of the Python 2.1 Bible.

    So here is my own personal gentle introduction to using pdb. It assumes that you are not using any IDE — that you’re coding Python with a text editor and running your Python programs from the command line.