Archive for June, 2010

Activate and cd to your project

How to Quickly Open Virtualenvs on Windows

Jun 7th

Posted by clawlor in Dev Tools

No comments

I develop on both Windows and Linux. In fact, I often work on the same projects in both environments.

In general, I find both environments to be mostly the same, as far as Python development is concerned. Mostly the same that is, except that virtualenvwrapper isn’t available on windows.

If you’re not familiar with virtualenvwrapper, it is a brilliant shell script that makes virtualenv super easy to work with. I highly recommend it (except of course if you’re on Windows)

One of the best things about virtualenvwrapper is it lets you quickly and easily activate any available virtualenv with the `workon` command.

$ workon virtualenv_name

(virtualenv_name)/path/to/project/dir/$

Not only does it activate the environment, but it will also automatically ‘cd’ you to the project’s working directory. You have to set the up manually but it is super simple, just add the ‘cd’ command to the ‘postactivate’ hook that virtualenvwrapper sets up in the virtualenv’s directory.

So, no virtualenvwrapper for Windows, but there are other ways to get a command shell which is already good to go for a given project.

In fact, it only takes a simple shortcut to cmd.exe with a few arguments. Create a new shortcut using the right-click context menu, then set

  • Target: %windir%\system32\cmd.exe /k More >
, ,

Django How-To: Add Debugging Apps to Your Local Settings

Jun 3rd

Posted by clawlor in Django

No comments

There are some great debugging apps, like the django-debug-toolbar and django-command-extensions, that help out immensely while developing your next killer Django site. There’s a small catch to using them though, which is that they have to be added to INSTALLED_APPS. No big deal, but you don’t really want these installed and running in a production install.

Again, no big deal. It’s an old trick now to maintain a separate local_settings.py file. By importing our local_settings at the end of the settings.py module, anything in local_settings will overwrite whatever is in settings.

So all we have to do then is make a new list of debugging apps in local_settings.py, and add them to the INSTALLED_APPS list in settings.py.

My first naive attempt was to do this:

# local_settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS +=  ('django_extensions',)

Can you spot the problem? The original INSTALLED_APPS is not available in local_settings.py, so we can’t add to it there.

Well, if we can’t add our list in local_settings.py, let’s add in in settings.py

# local_settings.py
DEBUG_APPS = ('django_extensions',)

# settings.py
try:
    from local_settings.py import *
    INSTALLED_APPS += DEBUG_APPS
except ImportError:
    pass

This works just fine, as long as there is a DEBUG_APPS list specified in local_settings.py. However, the whole point of having a local_settings.py file is to optionally add or overwrite settings.

To remove this dependency, More >

, ,