Tommy Setiawan

Setting up Dreamhost with Python, Django, Tastypie, South, etc

• Install VirtualEnv and PIP
  
  

  $ curl -O https://raw.github.com/pypa/virtualenv/master/virtualenv.py
  $ python virtualenv.py my_env
  $. my_env/bin/activate

  
  you should see your prompt slightly change now, indicating that you are within your new (my_env), you may start installing new packages into this new environment. More about pip here.
  I installed my_env in my home directory /home/<username>
  and the site packages under my_env will be installed in:
  /home/<username>/my_env/lib/python2.5/site-packages
  if you use a different directory, just adjust in the passenger_wsgi.py file
• Install Yolk
  
  

  $ pip install yolk

  
  This is basically just so that you can do “yolk -l” to list all the python packages installed in your environment. More about yolk here.
• Configure passenger_wsgi.py to use activate virtualenv
  edit passenger_wsgi.py in your app root directory (domain.com)
  

  import os, sys, site
  ....
  site.addsitedir('home/<username>/my_env/lib/python2.5/site-packages')
  activate_this = os.path.expanduser('~/my_env/bin/activate_this.py')
  execfile(activate_this, dict(__file__=activate_this))
  ....

  
  These are only the necessary lines, please merge with your passenger_wsgi.py accordingly. 
• Install TastyPie, don’tforget to run syncdb!
  
  

  $ pip install django-tastypie

• Install South
  

  $ pip install South

• Install *
  Means you can now install whatever you want into this new environment
  you can even install your own django version!
• To quit my_env just:
  
  

  $ deactivate