Setup Debian server for python deployment

Published: Mar 13, 2011 by Noe Nieto

Some notes about setting up a Debian 5.05 server for python webapp deployment. Note: this post should have been posted 3 or 4 months ago ;)) Yeeha! New server!

We’ve got a new server and It’s debian 5.05 (Lenny). We’ll be deploying python web apps all over the server, so this is how I did it. Let’s do it!

Update and upgrade.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Install development libraries:

apt-get install build-essential manpages-dev autoconf automake1.9 libtool libncurses-dev

Intstall Python 2.4

Compile Python 2.4.6 from sources. Deploy in /opt. Why? Because we might still need to deploy Plone 3.3 sites.

wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.4.6/Python-2.4.6.tar.bz2
tar -xjf Python-2.4.6.tar.bz2
cd Python-2.4.6
./configure --prefix=/opt/Python2.4
mkdir -p /opt/Python2.4
make && make install

Install Python 2.6

Compile Python 2.6.5 from sources. Deploy in /opt. Why? Because we will deploy Plone 4 and Django Apps.

wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6.5/Python-2.6.5.tar.bz2
tar -xjf  Python-2.6.5.tar.bz2
cd  Python-2.6.5
./configure --prefix=/opt/Python2.6
mkdir -p /opt/Python2.6
make && make install

Install GIT

We use git for several projects. Debian Lenny’s version is 1.5, and as of the date this post was written, the latest version is 1.7.2.1. Sooner or later we will need to upgrade, so I added the debian backports based on the instructions:

First I added this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Then, we need to update the package list and install the debian backports keyring so all the installed packages get verified.

apt-get update && apt-get install debian-backports-keyring

It looks odd, but once we installed debian-backports-keyring, we need to re- run:

apt-get update

We are ready to install git:

apt-get -t lenny-backports install git-core

Just to be sure:

git --version
git version 1.7.1

Install subversion

We will also need subversion from lenny-backports:

apt-get install -t lenny-backports subversion

Install pip and virtualenv for Python 2.4 and Python 2.6

We need to install pip and virtualenv for our recently installed Python 2.4 and 2.6. For 2.4:

cd ~
mkdir Python2.4-deps
cd Python2.4-deps
wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
/opt/Python2.4/bin/python ez_setup.py
/opt/Python2.4/bin/easy_install pip
/opt/Python2.4/bin/pip install virtualenv

For Python 2.6 is just the same, but changing the path:

cd ~
mkdir Python2.6-deps
cd Python2.6-deps
wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
/opt/Python2.6/bin/python ez_setup.py
/opt/Python2.6/bin/easy_install pip
/opt/Python2.6/bin/pip install virtualenv

Finally, install ZopeSkel (which is used for Plone buildouts) for both Python 2.4 and Python 2.6:

/opt/Python2.4/bin/pip install ZopeSkel && /opt/Python2.6/bin/pip install ZopeSkel

Set-up apache for django deployment

Install mod_wsgi. No notes for that yet.

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