JADDOG

Hit 100,000 miles in my jetta today.

I’ve been in and out of reading Knowing God by J.I. Packer for some time now.
I’ve been enjoying meditating on a passage I read last week:

… the statement “God is Love” means that his love find expressions in everything that he says and does.

The knowledge that this is so for us personally is the supreme comfort for Christians. As believers, we find in the cross of Christ assurance that we, as individuals, are beloved of God; “the Son of God…loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20). Knowing this, we are able to apply to ourselves the promise that all things work together for good to them that love God and are called according to his purpose (Rom 8:28). Not just some things, note, but all things! Every single thing that happens to us expresses God’s love for us.

Thus, so far as we are concerned, God is love to us – holy, omnipotent love – at every moment and in every event of every day’s life. Even when we cannot see the why and the wherefore of God’s dealings, we know that there is love in and behind them, and so we can rejoice always, even when, humanly speaking, things are going wrong. We know that the true story of our life, when known, will prove to be , as the hymn says, “mercy from first to last” – and we are content.

- J.I. Packer, Knowing God, Pages 122-123

This passage has blessed me as I’ve reflected on the things around me that go “humanly wrong”. Both in my and my family’s life and the life of the people around me. More often than not we do not specifically know, and may never truly know, why a particular event happened in someone’s life. Though, whether we’re glad or scared or frustrated or upset or don’t even care that some whatever has happened, we do know that it happened because our God loves us and is bringing himself glory through his creation.

I’ve spent the past 3 years developing two django projects.
Nushus: https://fedorahosted.org/nushus
Loki: https://fedorahosted.org/loki

When Red Hat released openshift I was interested to deploy django on it. I use MySQL with my django apps, mainly because that’s what I know well. The tutorial I was working through used sqlite so I’ve put this together to show how I got MySQL working with django on openshift.

Run this quick start to get your account and domain setup
https://openshift.redhat.com/app/express#quickstart
Then login to the website and open this turoial:
https://www.redhat.com/openshift/kb/kb-e1010-show-me-your-django-getting-django-up-and-running-in-5-minutes
Run the ‘Deploying a Django Application’ section of this tutorial to get a basic django app setup and running. Then you’ll have Django setup but with no admin:

After you get here, continue the tutorial related to the usual code edits needed in your django project to enable the admin. Don’t setup the sqlite database as the tutorial suggests, we’ll get connected to MySQL next.
Next lets setup the database:

testapp git:(master)➤ rhc-ctl-app -e add-mysql-5.1 -a testapp
Password:
Contacting https://openshift.redhat.com
Contacting https://openshift.redhat.com

RESULT:

Mysql 5.1 database added.  Please make note of these credentials:

   Root User: SuperSecretUser
   Root Password: SuperSecretPassword

Connection URL: mysql://127.XXX.XXX.XXXX:3306/

This will create the MySQL instance but not the database.
This forum post suggests the current method to get the database setup: https://www.redhat.com/openshift/forums/express/mysql-db-name
We need to also run syncdb, which the django tuorial shows us how to do. It also shows us how to deploy the admin media. I don’t like how the django tutorial makes us commit static code that’s already deployed. Let’s copy it remotely from the egg that’s already deployed into the remote static dir without commiting it. All this is done via the openshift build hook. I’ve rewritten it a bit in process of testing things so it will look a bit different than the tutorials:

testapp git:(master)➤ cat .openshift/action_hooks/build
#!/bin/bash
# This is a simple build script, place your post-deploy but pre-start commands
# in this script.  This script gets executed directly, so it could be python,
# php, ruby, etc.

# create the database if it doesn't exist
# https://www.redhat.com/openshift/forums/express/mysql-db-name
if ! /usr/bin/mysql -u "$OPENSHIFT_DB_USERNAME" --password="$OPENSHIFT_DB_PASSWORD" -h "$OPENSHIFT_DB_HOST" -e "show tables;" $OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME > /dev/null
then
    /usr/bin/mysqladmin -u "$OPENSHIFT_DB_USERNAME" --password="$OPENSHIFT_DB_PASSWORD" -h "$OPENSHIFT_DB_HOST" create "$OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME"
    echo "Created MySQL database $OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME"
fi

# copy the admin media into place
if [ ! -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then
    if mkdir $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/wsgi/static/admin
    then
        echo "Created directory $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/wsgi/static/admin"
        echo "Copying admin media into $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/wsgi/static/admin"
        cp -R $OPENSHIFT_APP_DIR/virtenv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Django-1.3-py2.6.egg/django/contrib/admin/media/** $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/wsgi/static/admin
    fi
fi

# cd into the project to run django manage.py commands
cd $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/wsgi/testapp

# run syncdb
# https://www.redhat.com/openshift/kb/kb-e1010-show-me-your-django-getting-django-up-and-running-in-5-minutes
echo "Executing './manage.py syncdb --noinput'"
./manage.py syncdb --noinput

This gets us to the login page for the admin:

Now all that’s missing is a user. I toyed with a couple options to get a basic user in. The command line manage.py won’t let you pass a password and I had trouble getting fixtures to load. Though, both of those required sql to verify if the user existed. Settled on a simple management command to make sure we have a user. We have to put it in an app, but we’re going to need an app eventually anyways to make django so more than start. So here’s what I did.
In the project directory run the django startapp command:

testapp/wsgi/testapp git:(master+)➤ ../manage.py startapp myapp

Then add it to the INSTALLED_APPS in your settings file

+     'testapp.myapp',

You have to put the projects name in there, otherwise things won’t work later. I got 500′s trying just to put just ‘myapp’ in the installed apps. This app won’t really do anything for now. It’s just a container for our management command. You can make it into something else later. Next create the directory structure for the command in the myapp directory.

testapp/wsgi/testapp git:(master+)➤ mkdir -p myapp/management/commands
testapp/wsgi/testapp git:(master+)➤ touch myapp/management/__init__.py myapp/management/commands/__init__.py
testapp/wsgi/testapp git:(master+)➤ vim myapp/management/commands/ensuresuperuser.py
testapp/wsgi/testapp git:(master+)➤ tree myapp
myapp
|-- __init__.py
|-- management
|   |-- commands
|   |   |-- ensuresuperuser.py
|   |   `-- __init__.py
|   `-- __init__.py
|-- models.py
|-- tests.py
`-- views.py

2 directories, 7 files

You can see I called my command ensuresuperuser. The command will check if the user exists and create it with a password equal to the user’s username if the user doesn’t exist. Here’s it’s code:

testapp/wsgi/testapp git:(master+)➤ cat myapp/management/commands/ensuresuperuser.py
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand, CommandError
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class Command(BaseCommand):
    args = 'username'
    help = 'make sure a user exists with a password'

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        try:
            user = User.objects.get(username=args[0])
        except:
            User.objects.create_superuser(args[0], email=args[0]+'@example.com', password=args[0])
            self.stdout.write('user %s created with password %s\n' % (args[0], args[0]))

Last thing to do is to add this command to your build hook so it executes when you push your code, so update your build hook. Here’s the whole contents of mine:

testapp git:(master+)➤ cat .openshift/action_hooks/build
#!/bin/bash
# This is a simple build script, place your post-deploy but pre-start commands
# in this script.  This script gets executed directly, so it could be python,
# php, ruby, etc.

# create the database if it doesn't exist
# https://www.redhat.com/openshift/forums/express/mysql-db-name
if ! /usr/bin/mysql -u "$OPENSHIFT_DB_USERNAME" --password="$OPENSHIFT_DB_PASSWORD" -h "$OPENSHIFT_DB_HOST" -e "show tables;" $OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME > /dev/null
then
    /usr/bin/mysqladmin -u "$OPENSHIFT_DB_USERNAME" --password="$OPENSHIFT_DB_PASSWORD" -h "$OPENSHIFT_DB_HOST" create "$OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME"
    echo "Created MySQL database $OPENSHIFT_APP_NAME"
fi

# copy the admin media into place
if [ ! -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then
    if mkdir $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/wsgi/static/admin
    then
        echo "Created directory $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/wsgi/static/admin"
        echo "Copying admin media into $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/wsgi/static/admin"
        cp -R $OPENSHIFT_APP_DIR/virtenv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Django-1.3-py2.6.egg/django/contrib/admin/media/** $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/wsgi/static/admin
    fi
fi

# cd into the project to run django manage.py commands
cd $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/wsgi/testapp

# run syncdb
# https://www.redhat.com/openshift/kb/kb-e1010-show-me-your-django-getting-django-up-and-running-in-5-minutes
echo "Executing './manage.py syncdb --noinput'"
./manage.py syncdb --noinput

# add an admin user
./manage.py ensuresuperuser admin

This time when you commit and push everything you will see it tell you “user admin created with password admin”. Obviously this is really insecure so go ahead and change that password right away. Wouldn’t want your throw away testapp become something it wasn’t intended for.

There you have it, OpenShift + Django + MySQL.
It’s worth noting, If you get a 500 error you need to use the rhc-snapshot command like so:

testapp git:(master+)➤ rhc-snapshot -a testapp
Password:
Contacting https://openshift.redhat.com
Pulling down a snapshot to testapp.tar.gz

This pulls down a tar ball of your running environment and has a logs directory in there that you can look at the apache logs. I’ll second Ian’s suggestion for a rhc-logwatch command. That would be pretty handy.

Next steps for me:
1. How to delete an OpenShift application (i.e. throw away testapp, I’m done with it)
2. Install Nushus in OpenShift!

*** Update ***
I came across another blog post a day later that reference rhc-tail-files. i.e. the watchlog thing I mentioned above is already a feature:

testapp git:(master+)➤ rhc-tail-files -a testapp
Password:
Contacting https://openshift.redhat.com
Attempting to tail files: testapp/logs/*
Use ctl + c to stop

==> testapp/logs/access_log-20110817-000000-EST <==
... snip log files output ...

Can’t sleep. All I can think about are the two snakes that have been hiding in the rocks at the lake.

I killed one today with a kayak paddle. It was a small water snake, don’t think it was venomous. It jumped about 3 feet at my wife and son the other day as they were pulling the kayak out of the water, it struck the boat. Luckily they were at the other end of the boat from where it tried to strike. I came across it today sunning itself on a rock and sliced off it’s head. My four year old son told me I had to kill it because snakes are bad.

Other one may have been a cottonmouth but we couldn’t be certain. It gave me a chance to kill it earlier this week but I wasn’t in snake killin’ mode yet.

Next time we’re at the lake the snakes that dare to show themselves won’t stand a chance. I’ll be ready for ‘em. I talk a big game, but really I almost decided to let the one today go. My son talked me back into it. Thanks bud, our dock is a safer place because of you.

God has blessed my wife and me with 8 years of marriage today!