Deploying Molly

Now you’ve got your Molly install configured and ready to deploy, there are two steps you can follow. The first is to do a local testing deploy using Django’s built in web server, and the second is to configure Apache to serve the site.

For development and demonstrations, the local testing install is sufficient, however the Django webserver should not be considered as reliable or secure for anything other than local testing.

Local Testing Installs

There are two ways to start up the Django development server. If you do a development install of Molly (pass the -d flag to setup.py deploy), then the development server will automatically start at the end of the install.

The alternative way is to start the server by hand. There are two steps to this, the first is to activate the virtualenv, and the second to start the server:

source /path/to/install/bin/activate
cd /path/to/install/deploy
python manage.py runserver

Configuring Apache

When a new site is created by the Molly installer, than a sample WSGI and Apache configuration file is generated, which can be used to get Molly up and running. If you did not create your site using the Molly installer, then sample files are included below.

WSGI is an interface between web applications like Molly and a webserver, so you must install the mod_wsgi Apache module and then configure mod_wsgi in your Apache configuration to serve your site.

Warning

Molly by default uses a virtualenv to manage dependencies. mod_wsgi must therefore be set up to use this virtualenv. This can be accomplished by adding WSGIPythonHome /path/to/install/ to your httpd.conf or mod_wsgi configuration file.

You must also set up Apache to serve your site media, as compiled in the directory specified by STATIC_ROOT (this is the media folder in a default install) at the URL specified by the STATIC_URL setting.

Sample Apache virtualhost config:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    # Change the following settings as appropriate
    ServerName m.example.ac.uk
    ServerAdmin molly@example.ac.uk

    WSGIDaemonProcess molly user=molly group=molly
    WSGIProcessGroup molly
    WSGIScriptAlias / /path/to/my/site/apache/molly.wsgi

    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

    # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
    # alert, emerg.
    LogLevel warn

    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined

    Alias /media /path/to/my/site/media
    # It is recommended you create these two files and then set up the links
    # as appropriate
    #Alias /robots.txt /path/to/robots.txt
    #Alias /favicon.ico /path/to/favicon.ico

</VirtualHost>

Sample WSGI script:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os, os.path
import sys

os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'deploy.settings'
sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath(os.path.join(
os.path.dirname(__file__), '..', '..',
)))

import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

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