Is Django installed on any of the acm machines? If not, is there any chance somebody could install it?

It's not critical or anything, but I wrote a sort of tunez interface replacement in django and i'd like to throw it onto the sigsoft directory. let me know if there's anything i can do.

The sucrose admin site is Django-based.

I used virtualenv (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv), so the app has its own copies of its dependent libraries. With Django moving so quickly and individual site maintainers not necessarily being able to keep up with changes, using virtualenv or something like it is necessary. It also makes moving from development to deployment really trivial.

Note: you will need to set up virtualenv on a Debian etch machine, such as www-test, rather than one of the Ubuntu workstations. (The plan is to put Debian lenny on the workstations by the beginning of the fall semester, although you'll need to keep using Python 2.4 until the Web servers are upgraded).

If you try to use network functions of easy_install on www-test, you'll notice it doesn't have a direct Internet connection. You can use our HTTP proxy server. For example:

www-test% export http_proxy="http://www.acm.uiuc.edu:8888/" www-test% easy_install -U setuptools

Similarly, you can't get in from outside. If you're off campus and want to test the Django dev server on www-test, try SSH tunneling it through another ACM machine, like this:

your-box% ssh -L8000:www-test.acm.uiuc.edu:8000 some-acm-machine

www-test% cd /path/to/django/project www-test% cd python manage.py runserver www-test:8000

then you can access it from 127.0.0.1:8000. (Or just use the CITES VPN.)

For authentication I use the patch in ticket 689 (http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/689), which hopefully will be merged into Django in the next couple of weeks.

For authorization (perhaps not an issue if you don't use the Django admin) I wrote a backend that caches PTS/LDAP info in the database - not particularly elegant but it works. See <http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/projects/SIGArch/browser/sucrose/trunk/www/src/sucrose/backends.py>.

Once you've got everything set up in a virtualenv, perhaps in /afs/acm/sig/soft/dev, let admin know the URL where you want it hosted, and we'll set up the FastCGI and static serving bits on the main Web servers.