fidzu : Django

An interview with Tobias Macey on learning and teaching Django.

18 Sep 2018 1:28pm GMT

We shouldn't take Alexa for granted. While Amazon's intelligent assistant may seem capable of answering our every whim and inquiry, it takes a lot of behind-the-scenes development to make it happen. Just ask Distillery Android Developer Dmitry Sitnikov. The post Alexa, What Can You Teach Me Today? Distillery Developer Attends Alexa Dev Day appeared first on Distillery.

14 Sep 2018 1:00am GMT

We shouldn't take Alexa for granted. While Amazon's intelligent assistant may seem capable of answering our every whim and inquiry, it takes a lot of behind-the-scenes development to make it happen. Just ask Distillery Android Developer Dmitry Sitnikov. The post Alexa, What Can You Teach Me Today? Distillery Developer Attends Alexa Dev Day appeared first on Distillery.

14 Sep 2018 1:00am GMT

We shouldn't take Alexa for granted. While Amazon's intelligent assistant may seem capable of answering our every whim and inquiry, it takes a lot of behind-the-scenes development to make it happen. Just ask Distillery Android Developer Dmitry Sitnikov. The post Alexa, What Can You Teach Me Today? Distillery Developer Attends Alexa Dev Day appeared first on Distillery.

14 Sep 2018 1:00am GMT

At the 2018 Scala Days North America conference, Distillery Scala Developer Artem Mitrakov learned many things. Chiefly, however, he learned how incredibly much there is to learn about Scala. The Scala community is steaming ahead, actively developing Scala-based technologies and frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark, Akka Streams, Akka HTTP, Apache Kafka) that, according to Artem, "can help make apps more efficient, stable, and robust." The post Distillery Developer Attends Scala Days Conference in New York appeared first on Distillery.

11 Sep 2018 10:44pm GMT

At the 2018 Scala Days North America conference, Distillery Scala Developer Artem Mitrakov learned many things. Chiefly, however, he learned how incredibly much there is to learn about Scala. The Scala community is steaming ahead, actively developing Scala-based technologies and frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark, Akka Streams, Akka HTTP, Apache Kafka) that, according to Artem, "can help make apps more efficient, stable, and robust." The post Distillery Developer Attends Scala Days Conference in New York appeared first on Distillery.

11 Sep 2018 10:44pm GMT

At the 2018 Scala Days North America conference, Distillery Scala Developer Artem Mitrakov learned many things. Chiefly, however, he learned how incredibly much there is to learn about Scala. The Scala community is steaming ahead, actively developing Scala-based technologies and frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark, Akka Streams, Akka HTTP, Apache Kafka) that, according to Artem, "can help make apps more efficient, stable, and robust." The post Distillery Developer Attends Scala Days Conference in New York appeared first on Distillery.

11 Sep 2018 10:44pm GMT

If a view extends django-filter's FilterView it may look similar to this:

from django_filters.views import FilterView
from .filters import JobFilter

class JobList(FilterView):
    model = Job
        paginate_by = 20
        filterset_class = JobFilter

JobFilter has a single filter field city that filters jobs by city and generate URL like /jobs/?city=London ...

Read now

10 Sep 2018 9:46am GMT

Angular API Calls with Django, Part 2: Building the Micro-Blog App

Keith Dechant Sun, 09/09/2018 - 07:24

09 Sep 2018 12:24pm GMT

I shelved/buried my blog when I upgraded to a new Slicehost Linode six years ago. I didn't have it on Github or Gitlab, or on my personal dev machine, and it seemed to be completely purged from my little server. My last hope was the tarball labelled fullbackup.tar.gz in the home dir of the server. Oh, but by the way, my server was out of disk space and I was doing all this while on vacation in rural Nova Scotia, where high speed Internet is still a far-away dream.

Step 0: Bytes. Their Burdensome Storage. Their Inscrutable Movement.

One of the first things I learned was how to get Linux to expand its volume to use up new capacity generously granted to me by Linode. After trying lots of things and fretting about how I hadn't set up lfs and so on, here's what I found out:

1. You go to the Linode manager site
2. You click the volume you want to increase
3. You set the new size (I pushed it up to the new maximum of my plan)
4. That's it.

Well, I think I had to power off my VM while I did that. I can't remember. Anyway, I'm still at rank Junior Pussywillow when it comes to ops stuff, so I don't understand how the interface works between my Linode VM and the Linode infrastructure. It's not lxc stuff (it predates all that, I think) but Linode boots my VM with a kernel it lets me configure on the Linode side, and it's able to resize not just the partitions of the virtual disks, but actually resize the volume itself. Whatever. Witchcraft.

Anyway, once I had disk space, I still had it in my head that I wanted to untar the mystery backup tarball on my local computer, not on the server, but my server is in New Jersey and my laptop was in the hinterlands and online via a strained WiMax connection. So I decided to use Dropbox.

It turns out Dropbox has a command line client that seems to work pretty well. It even has a separate python script that can tell you how the dropbox daemon is doing once it's up.

So I let the daemon pull my Dropbox's contents to my server (and got a friendly note from Linode that my server was downloading a lot of stuff and they thought I should know). Then I moved my backup tarball in there and waited for a minute or two while the 2.5gb file uploaded. After that I just had to wait about a day for my laptop's Dropbox client to trickle the file down to me.

The backup was just a tarball of the whole dang server. I don't remember why I made that backup, but I'm glad I did, because sure enough my blog code was in there, as were the SQL dumps from the db.

Things That Made Sense Ten Years Ago: I used to deploy by keeping a checkout of my git repo on my servers and pulling/pushing to them from my dev machine. I also used to think I should keep all assets (source images, design mockups, etc.) for a project in a single repo. Setting aside how crazy that seems now, this's two more bits of good fortune. I didn't just have the code and the data, I had the commit history and all the source assets. I don't always approve of 10-years-younger me, but hey, not bad.

me: blows dust off let's see if it still works

Before I did anything else, I created a private gitlab repo for my project and pushed everything up. It took a while to shovel 100s of megabytes of unused astronomy concept photos up over backwater Internet, but it was worth it for the peace of mind before I went ahead and potentially messed it all up.

My plan was to get the site back up first and then try to spruce it up afterwards. The one thing I did do was carve all the source assets out of the repo. I moved them over to a dir that'd be backed up, because I wanted to keep them, but I decided they didn't need to be in version control and they definitely didn't need to be in my blog repo.

Above: Evidence of the purge

It wasn't too hard to get the blog running on my laptop.

Whoops. Backup was from prod, so it was using the prod settings. Past me left me an example settings file for use in local dev. Thanks past me!

Better. And I recognize this one. Good old syncdb!

I had one other mystery error that ended up being to do with my project's dependencies.

Things That Made Sense Ten Years Ago: Because I'd never heard of virtualenv or pip, my projects had minimal dependencies and I kept copies of those dependencies in a lib dir within the project repo. So my blog repo had a copy of every library it used, including all 21 megs of the Django 1.0 checkout. But it gets worse. If the dependencies had compiled elements, like psycopg2, I'd just install them on the system python.

In this case I just had to make myself a little virtualenv and pip install psycopg2, aggdraw, and PIL Pillow.

Hey!

Next up I just needed to dump everything back onto my server.

Catching Up To 2014

I tried using scp to copy my slimmed down project dir tree back over to my server (minus the .git dir this time), but it was so so painfully slow. And I still had a lot to copy because I was still hauling all of Django around in my repo with me.

Ah well. I decided to leave that for later. In the interim I switched to rsync, and man, rsync is still awesome. It ran like greased lightning, and it wasn't hard to get back into the groove of crafting a baroque rsync command. Here's what I wrote:

rsync --dry-run -avz --progress \
    --exclude build/site/pocketuniverse/settings_local.py \
    --exclude build/site/pocketuniverse/localdev.db \
    --exclude build/site/hosting/prod/log \
    --exclude=".DS_Store" \
    --exclude "*.pyc" \
    --exclude "*.sw?" \
    ./build sam@<server>:projects/pocketuniverse/

I went looking for my nginx conf file to symlink into the sites-available dir and dang, no nginx conf. This is probably why I turned off my blog.

Things That Made Sense Ten Years Ago: My site deployed with apache and mod_wsgi. At the time apache was old, but it was still the reliable standard, at least to me.

I vaguely remember that my server restructuring was driven by a need to deploy a new site that had new dependencies incompatible with everything else on the site. I decided, back in 2014 that it was time to start using virtualenv, and I think that drove the switch to my new stack: nginx, supervisor, and gunicorn.

Adapting the blog to the new stack wasn't as hard as I'd worried. I just cribbed from my other deployed projects. Here's what I ended up with:

My nginx config file:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name www.pocketuniverse.ca;
  return 301 $scheme://pocketuniverse.ca$request_uri;
}
 
server {
  listen 80;
  server_name pocketuniverse.ca;
  access_log  /<project-dir>/log/nginx-access.log;
  error_log /<project-dir>/log/nginx-error.log warn;
 
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8030;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  }
  location /media/ {
    alias /<project-dir>/pocketuniverse/media/;
  }
}

My supervisor config file:

[program:gunicorn-pocketuniverse]
command=
    /<project-dir>/env/bin/gunicorn
    wsgi:application
    -c /<project-dir>/config/gunicorn.conf.py
directory=/<project-dir>
user=sam
autostart=true
autorestart=true
redirect_stderr=true

My gunicorn config file:

workers = 1
bind = 'localhost:8030'
chdir = '/<project-dir>'
accesslog = '/<project-dir>/log/gunicorn-access.log'
errorlog = '/<project-dir>/log/gunicorn-errors.log'

I re-created my postgres user and db, dumped all the contents back in, and surprisingly, the whole thing sort of worked.

And it's via this shuddered-back-to-life blog that I'm posting these very words.

Next

It's a jumble of priorities. Lots of stuff that wants and needs doing. Here's my tentative plan:

1. Tidy up dir structure - I don't want to have to fight with my old dir structures when I'm making changes, so I'm going to try and sanitize that first
2. Switch to pipenv - Stop carrying my third party libraries with me
3. Write some tests
4. Set up CI on gitlab
5. Upgrade my dependencies
6. Bug fixes
7. Redesign
8. New Features

How hard could it be?

09 Sep 2018 4:49am GMT

This blog started in the winter of 2008. I'd been in the industry for a few years and Django had reached 1.0. I figured it was time to make myself a blog, knowing, even then, that it was completely unnecessary. I just wanted the practice.

My last post (something not-that-great about Christmas) was, until now, from December 2012.

Anyway, a lot has changed in the software world. I've also caught up with a few things I wish I'd known 10 years ago.

So, lacking anything else to write about. I'm going to try and refurbish this blog and write about that.

Here's just a few of the things to address:

• deployment - this thing deployed via git, I wouldn't mind making it into a tidy little docker image
• Django version - running on Django 1.0, which is only 13 major releases out of date
• CI/CD - didn't have any, now I want some
• tests - LOL
• new server - this thing is snuggled into a janky 14.04 server. I want to move to my new 18.04 server
• new postgres - the older server's running Postgresql 9.3
• new design - It'd be nice if this thing looked a little better
• disable comments - I think I only ever got about 10 actual comments. The remaining >30,000 are all spam.

08 Sep 2018 8:31pm GMT

Python and Django best practices for imports.

05 Sep 2018 3:28pm GMT

Why it's a best practice to explicitly call makemigrations

05 Sep 2018 3:28pm GMT

Today I'm pleased to announce the release of django-registration 3.0. This is a pretty big update, and one that's been coming for a while, so I want to take a moment to go briefly through the changes (if you want the full version, you can check out the upgrade guide in the documentation).

This also marks the retirement of the 2.x release series of django-registration; 2.5.2 is on PyPI, and I intend ...

Read full entry

04 Sep 2018 7:30pm GMT

DevOps, short for development and operations, is a hot topic in the technology sector. That is because optimizing DevOps pipelines is a crucial component of business strategies for many operations today. Recently, new tools have been made available online that make DevOps pipeline optimization much simpler for those professionals responsible for the job. These tools make it possible to create a DevOps process flow diagram that allows you to visualize your entire DevOps process. Find out the advantages of using a DevOps pipeline diagram generator in the post below. The post Why Use A DevOps Pipeline Diagram Generator To Visualize Optimization appeared first on Distillery.

04 Sep 2018 3:05pm GMT

DevOps, short for development and operations, is a hot topic in the technology sector. That is because optimizing DevOps pipelines is a crucial component of business strategies for many operations today. Recently, new tools have been made available online that make DevOps pipeline optimization much simpler for those professionals responsible for the job. These tools make it possible to create a DevOps process flow diagram that allows you to visualize your entire DevOps process. Find out the advantages of using a DevOps pipeline diagram generator in the post below. The post Why Use A DevOps Pipeline Diagram Generator To Visualize Optimization appeared first on Distillery.

04 Sep 2018 3:05pm GMT