Monday, February 25, 2013

Django on Heroku: Revisited

Last week, I spent quite a while getting a simple "Hello World" Django app in place on Heroku. This week, I wanted to see if I could repeat the process by posting a small working demo project. Things went much more smoothly this time around.

I used git to grab a local clone of the project. I used virtualenv to setup a virtual environment and pip to load that environment with the project's requirements.

I created a local PostgreSQL database so I could test things locally. I remembered to set the DATABASE_URL environmental variable and to sync Django with the new database. I debated on whether I needed to run python manage.py collectstatic in order to move the website's static files (such as scripts and stylesheets), but the site ran fine locally as-is without it.

Since everything seemed to work fine locally, it was time to push to Heroku. I double-checked that .gitignore was in place with venv and *.pyc in it. When I ran git add . I realized that I'd done all of this testing without touching a single project file. That's a neat design.

I created a new heroku app and used git to push the files to heroku. I initially forgot to sync the database on Heroku's end, but the resulting error message was obvious and it only took a minute to correct. To make sure everything really worked, I used Django's default admin interface to add some database contents (a poll with 4 possible answers). Everything seems to be running fine.

Given the light expected traffic, I didn't bother to switch out the default Django server for gunicorn.

All of this took me about 1 hour, compared to last week's 20 hours. Now that I've got this down, maybe Heroku isn't so bad after all!


Friday, February 22, 2013

Django on Heroku: A Reader's Companion

I recently setup a fresh VirtualBox Debian Linux system. Within that context, I then walked through the Heroku tutorial on Getting Started with Django on Heroku. I ran into a number of errors along the way. Most of them took a few minutes (or an hour) of surfing to find a solution. If you've found this page, perhaps you hit one of those same error messages, and so my solutions will save you a little time.

I'll follow the sections of the current Django on Heroku tutorial here and just add the errors and solutions I encountered.

Prerequisites

There are a bunch of different Python installers out there: pip, distribute, setuptools, easy_install, etc. You'll need both pip and virtualenv... but virtualenv is listed specifically as a prereq at the start of the tutorial. According to the virtualenv page, the preferred way to get virtualenv is to use pip... but the best way to get pip is to use virtualenv. To resolve this, I decided to install pip globally... but pip requires distribute. Of course, the easiest way to get distribute is to use pip to install it (haha!)... but there is also this option where you use curl (or wget) to download an installation script. Once you have distribute, you can do something similar for pip.

Start a Django app inside a Virtualenv

It turns out the virtual environment needs a few things installed locally too...

Error: pg_config executable not found.

You need the postgresql package installed. (Use apt-get install postgresql to install it.)

Error: You need to install postgresql-server-dev-X.Y for building a server-side
extension or libpq-dev for building a client-side application.

Okay, so you also need the postgresql-server-dev-9.1 package (currently).

In file included from psycopg/psycopgmodule.c:27:0:
./psycopg/psycopg.h:30:20: fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.

And the python-dev package too.

Hooray! At this point, I could get a Python app created in the virtualenv and run it. Things seemed downhill for me from here until...

Deploy to Heroku

Typing heroku create gave me:

!    Heroku client internal error.
getaddrinfo: Name or service not known (SocketError)
This error was coming from the excon gem. heroku login gave me the same error. Turns out I had a DNS problem. I entered 8.8.8.8 (Google's public DNS server) into /etc/resolve.conf and tried it again. Worked.

Then git push heroku master lead to:

Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

I needed to generate a public key with: ssh-keygen -t rsa By default, this puts the key into ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. You then need to register it with Heroku: heroku keys:add ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

At this point, I could execute the basic Django app both locally (with foreman start) and on Heroku.

Although my app wasn't actually using the database, I figured I'd better try syncing with it anyway...

Syncing the database

I wanted to run it locally first, so I needed to setup a local postgreSQL database. (The tips on the assignment page were very helpful here.) Also, you need to be postgre user in order to execute the psql command that starts the PostgreSQL console. (It took me a while to even track that command down.) So:

root@tinkVr:~# su postgres
postgres@tinkVr:/root$ psql
could not change directory to "/root"
psql (9.1.8)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# CREATE USER django WITH CREATEDB PASSWORD 'djangoapp';
CREATE ROLE
postgres=# CREATE DATABASE a17 OWNER django;
CREATE DATABASE
postgres=# \q

You'll probably want to change the lowercase details (user, password, and database names) to something else. Note that you do not need to update your Django project's settings.py with these details because dj_database_url will pull these from from the DATABASE_URL environment variable. (If you log into Heroku's web interface and check your database settings, you can see what these values will actually be in the Heroku environment.) However, to run locally, you do need to set this variable appropriately. In my case, this translates to:

export DATABASE_URL=postgres://django:djangoapp@localhost/a17

typed at the command prompt.

At this point, I could successfully run python manage.py syncdb locally. However, heroku run python manage.py syncdb lead to a timeout. This happened even when just trying to open a simple shell on Heroku with heroku run bash. Heroku does offer some troubeshooting on this. It turns out port 5000 was being blocked by my ISP (the wired network in the Computer Science department on campus). I switched to the public UH wireless and I was able to connect.

The rest of tutorial went smoothly for me. (pip installs gunicorn for you.) Hopefully it goes smoothly for you too!

Next up: Fleshing out the Django app to actually do something...

Debian 7 on a VirtualBox

I'm currently taking a class on serious games. We've already covered Django and the nature of gamification. This week we are trying to deploy a simple Django project to Heroku, a cloud-based app hosting service. This proved fairly difficult, requiring that we get a long toolchain in place. (Details of that process to follow.)

This toolchain requires running scripts that download and install other required components. Whenever you're missing something, you get error messages that look like this:

  building 'psycopg2._psycopg' extension
  error: Unable to find vcvarsall.bat
You then have to figure out why you don't have vcvarsall.bat, or why it's not in the right place, and what you need to do to fix it.

Other students in the class reported that, since most of the required tools assume a unix-like environment, trying to get everything configured in Windows seemed to lead to even more problems. Also, project dependency managers like Ivy or pip always make me a little nervous. I don't really like the idea of downloading some dude's script from GitHub, running it, and having it download other arbitrary code from various points around the web and freely executing it all on my machine.

Given this context, I decided to create a Linux environment to work in. While I've dual-booted on a number of different machines before, I decided to try a virtual machine this time. There are a lot of advantages to this:

  • No need to mess with your current partition configuration.
  • Your can run the virtualized OS in a window, switching back and forth between the environments, even copying clipboard and file data between them.
  • You can pause and save a running instance. (I've already used this feature: I paused a lengthy compilation/installation process so I could shutdown the real machine and then resumed everything again in the morning.)
  • You can take a snapshot of the whole machine as a backup, which can be especially handy before you make any significant OS changes.
  • You can copy the entire virtual OS environment to another machine. So, once you get your OS all configured, you're not bound to the original hardware.

For my virtual machine, I went with VirtualBox over VMware, since VirtualBox costs nothing and is open-source. Their provided documentation is pretty good too.

I then installed Debian 7 on it. (I actually did this twice, but here's what the process looked like the second time around. I'm assuming here that you know the basics of installing a Linux system.)

Due to previous Linux endeavors, I already had an ISO of the last stable Debian release (6.0/"squeeze") handy on a CD. (If I was doing this from scratch, I would grab a "testing" ISO instead.) I created a VirtualBox machine with a 12.0GB hard drive. (I hear this the only parameter you can't change once you create the machine.) Although it's a little slower, I went with a dynamically-sized file to save space on my host machine. I gave the machine 2GB of RAM and 1 CPU. (I'm used to running Linux on ancient hardware, so this is more than most of my installations get.) When I first started the virtual machine, it booted off the CD and began the installation wizard.

Debian's default Graphical Install worked out fine. When asked for what subsystems to install, I unchecked everything (including Standard System Utilities), so I had the barest machine possible. The default setup reserved 500MB of my 12GB for a swap partition.

The "stable" release tends to get outdated. For example, squeeze gives you Python 2.6. The current 2.7.3 is available in the "testing" release, and that will be updated within about a week of any new Python updates. So, once the installation was done, I edited my /etc/apt/sources.list to pull from "testing" rather than "squeeze". I then ran an apt-get dist-upgrade to switch over.

In upgrading, I got a new kernel. On rebooting, I found that my virtualbox guest services were not longer starting up properly. I would get this error:

AdditionsVBoxService error: VbglR3Init failed with rc=VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND

At this point, the only obvious problem this caused is my mouse scrollwheel stopped working, but I knew it could cause other problems later on. I eventually learned that I needed to install the appropriate linux-header package. (While I love the idea of Linux, this is an example of why I don't actually use it everyday. You upgrade something that's supposed to be routine and suddenly something else breaks with some arcane error that requires an hour to debug, some config file hacking, and some new packages to track down. <sarcasm>Oh, you're obviously just missing the necessary the kernel headers. Duh!</sarcasm>)

For my desktop environment, I used: apt-get install lxde. This is pretty minimalist desktop, but I figured it should still be snappy in the virtual machine. So far, it is responsive. It looks crude coming to it from Windows 7, but I find I don't mind so much when I have Windows 7 running in the background, a single click away! When I get some time, I'm curious to see how well the latest KDE runs under these conditions.

I also installed openjdk7 and Eclipse (which wanted openjdk6 and a bunch of other stuff).

At this point, I had a working virtual Linux machine. Time to put it to work!

LXDE in maximized window with Windows taskbar readily available below.