Initial setup Django 1.5 with django-celery 3.0 and rabbitmq broker

System/Requirements – Django 1.5 with django-celery 3.0 and a rabbitmq broker on ubuntu 13.10 (Xubuntu)

• Assumption – you already have a functioning django site up and running, you can see my previous post.

The end goal is to be able to observe and track tasks (especially longer running tasks) from the django admin. For example, to use the following task.py

from celery import task

@task
def add(x, y):
    return x + y

Then observe tasks being recorded in the admin site. http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/djcelery/taskstate/?

Using Bootstrap with Django

Part 2

This is a continuation from the previous post on using django-skel to create a new django project.

Overview

In this post we will walk through using Bootstrap (a front-end framework for developing responsive projects) github.

Assumptions: you have already completed the previous post and have an initial working django site.

Goal: The result of this tutorial / walk-through is a django page with the basic template from the http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/ guide.

Using django-skel to create a new Django site

Part 1

This is the first step – in Part 2 I cover adding bootstrap support.

Overview

Create a django site using django-skel on xubuntu 13.10 using django 1.5.

I have not created a new django site for a while (having been consumed with opencv and TurboGears), so I wanted to start a fresh walkthrough (also to prepare for startup weekend http://redesignsea.startupweekend.org/). By the end I was able to get an admin page going, a good layout for the project, and lots of helpful developer tools in place.

Following the excellent documentation provided for django-skel:

• https://github.com/rdegges/django-skel
• http://django-skel.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Python depth first search with graphviz

Graphviz is an awesome tool to help visualize graphs, and there is a handy interface for python http://github.com/pygraphviz. This is a basic example of how to do a depth first search in python and then visual the results. I will walk through the basic steps to get graphviz and what I did to make it work.

NOTE: graphviz provides search implementations, I have created a beginner/toy implementation for demonstration purposes.

Requirements

1. Linux – Xubuntu 13.10 – can be made to work for other systems but this is what I am using for this guide.
2. Python 2.7 – assumed that you got it as part of xubuntu.
3. virtualenv – could do without but I have used it here.

Example Results

What you can expect at the end – generate a png for each step of the depth first search

Working through MongoEngine Tutorial

Having reviewed several available options – I decided it would be fun to try MongoEngine with my new Django site.

I will be walking through this tutorial to start with – http://docs.mongoengine.org/en/latest/tutorial.html. I will start where I left off with the skeleton site.

Getting Started

The suggested installing it with “$ pip install mongoengine”

(lazybower)rcstats@ubuntu:~/Desktop/lazybower/LazyBower$ pip install mongoengine
Downloading/unpacking mongoengine
 Downloading mongoengine-0.8.4.tar.gz (124kB): 124kB downloaded
 Running setup.py egg_info for package mongoengine
 0.8.4

 no previously-included directories found matching 'docs/_build'
Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade to upgrade): pymongo>=2.5 in /home/rcstats/Desktop/lazybower/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from mongoengine)
Installing collected packages: mongoengine
 Running setup.py install for mongoengine
 0.8.4

 no previously-included directories found matching 'docs/_build'
Successfully installed mongoengine
Cleaning up...

I then went ahead and added it to the dev requirements (requirements/dev.txt).

Werkzeug==0.8.3
 flake8==2.0
 ipython==0.13.2
+mongoengine==0.8.4

python manage.py shell_plus
In [1]: from mongoengine import *

In [2]: connect('tumblelog')
Out[2]: MongoClient('localhost', 27017)

Complete the Tutorial

I ran through without incident just pumping the commands suggested in the tutorial into the django ipython shell.

(lazybower)rcstats@ubuntu:~/Desktop/lazybower/LazyBower$ python manage.py shell_plus

from mongoengine import *

connect('tumblelog')

class User(Document):
 email = StringField(required=True)
 first_name = StringField(max_length=50)
 last_name = StringField(max_length=50)

class Comment(EmbeddedDocument):
 content = StringField()
 name = StringField(max_length=120)

class Post(Document):
 title = StringField(max_length=120, required=True)
 author = ReferenceField(User, reverse_delete_rule=CASCADE)
 tags = ListField(StringField(max_length=30))
 comments = ListField(EmbeddedDocumentField(Comment))
 meta = {'allow_inheritance': True}

class TextPost(Post):
 content = StringField()

class ImagePost(Post):
 image_path = StringField()

class LinkPost(Post):
 link_url = StringField()

Mongo Cheat Sheet

http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/getting-started-with-the-mongo-shell/

So you can double check your work, here is the cheat sheet I use:

Results

That gives an overview of my experience getting started with MongoEngine. I was fairly pleased and will move on to integrating it with a Django app in the following post.

 

Starting a new Django site

Overview

Start a new django site using one of the available skeleton/templates for django projects on a Linux Ubuntu system. This will be a record of the steps and modifications I needed to make this run on my developer system.

• Results available via github project https://github.com/AnthonyHonstain/LazyBower

Assumptions – this guide uses xubuntu 13.04 and assumes you already have django installed. This walkthrough was just intended to be a record of the steps required to use a skeleton project. You can find the django install guide here along with their excellent tutorial.

Django Memcache

Overview

I want to increase the performance of several pages on http://www.rc-stats.com, there are a few problematic pages that are taking several seconds to load. They have rarely changing content, but somewhat complex queries to the DB underneath them. I have decided to use memcache and will be using the following references as a guide:

• http://docs.webfaction.com/software/django/config.html
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2899178/using-memcached-in-python-django-questions
• http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter15/