Setup server is always a pain in the ass (if you don’t know chef or other similar tools). It took me two days to get my django app running on the VPS. My problem is there are a lot of tutorials on the website, but few of them cover everything. Also the tutorials are not always working for me, there are many weird problems that are very difficult to Google. So I made some notes for myself, hope it can help you as well.

Postgresql 9.2 on CentOS 6.3

• Order of entries in pg_hba.conf is important. Always add the new user to the top of the list (that means before host all all).
• If localhost gives you ident error, try connect using -h 127.0.0.1. Might be your VPS is using ipv6 address for localhost.
• initdb with UTF8 support when your database is still empty.

Deploy Django using Apache + WSGI + Virtualenv

It seems simple from beginning because I have configured it with non-daemon mode before. This time I try to make it run in daemon mode. The tricky thing is there are many reasons for you to end up with a “ImportError: No module named django.core.wsgi” error. Here is a list you can go through to figure it out:

• did you install mod_wsgi.so using yum? The module in yum is only for Python 2.6 so you have to compile your own mod_wsgi.so file.
• run “ldd mod_wsgi.so” to check if libpython.2.7.so.1 shows up. if not, you have to recompile python2.7 and mod_wsgi with –enable-shared option.
• if it still gets that error, check the permission setting for your virtualenv folder, is the user running daemon has enough privilege?

I have been trying django-activity-stream for weeks now and it is a great Django app. Everything worked great until today, when the tag “follow_all_url” stops rendering unfollow urls.

I tracked back the problem back to a function in class DisplayActivityFollowUrl in activity_tags.py file:

def render(self, context):
    actor_instance = self.actor.resolve(context)
    content_type = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(actor_instance).pk
    if Follow.objects.is_following(context.get('user'), actor_instance):
        return reverse('actstream_unfollow', kwargs={
            'content_type_id': content_type, 'object_id': actor_instance.pk})
    if self.actor_only:
        return reverse('actstream_follow', kwargs={
            'content_type_id': content_type, 'object_id': actor_instance.pk})
    return reverse('actstream_follow_all', kwargs={
        'content_type_id': content_type, 'object_id': actor_instance.pk})

context.get(‘user’) is supposed to get the request.user, but instead it gets nothing. A similar question on stackflow indicates that a setting might be missing, which is not the case but I think it is something wrong with how I created the view. I use class-based generic view and here is how my get_context_data() looks like:

def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
	ctx = kwargs
	ctx['users'] = User.objects.all()
	return super(StreamView, self).get_context_data(**ctx)

Doesn’t look like it is the problem:(

I remember at first I used activity-stream with pinax-project-account project, and it worked with pinax-user-account app which also does something with the context_processing setting. In this new project I remove the user-account app and switched it with django-social-auth, maybe it missed something in my context?

I haven’t found a solution yet, but I will post the update to the problem here. For now, I think I can temporarily change that line to context.get(‘request’).user instead.

Update:
It was quite stupid actually, I have an object list in the template called “users”, so in a for loop each iterated item is called “user”. Change that to “people” solved the problem.