Installing Django with no root access

I really have enjoyed working with a $5/month hosting company for seriously small projects with few performance requirements. The service that I am using at this time is site5. They offer a great plan that works for me and the many simple projects I have been using as prototypes.

For this specific discussion I am going to talk about what I needed to do get the lastest django (v1.4) working on site5.

Sandbox environment

Lets setup our little sandbox area for placing the source to compile and the actually compiled instance

    cd ~
    mkdir installed
    cd installed
    mkdir compile
    cd compile

Next we will download python for use on the instance. (Django 1.4 doesn’t work with python 3)

    wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.3/Python-2.7.3.tar.bz2
    tar -xvf Python-2.7.3.tar.bz2 

Note: This is specific for version 2.7.3 which was the stable release at the time this article was written

So we have the source, now we need to compile and install Python 2.7 (non root user)

    cd Python-2.7.3
    ./configure PREFIX=$HOME/installed/python2.7
    make install DESTDIR=$HOME/installed/python2.7

Add python to the PATH for simplicity, to do this we will add an entry to the .bash_profile file located in our home directory

    cd ~
    echo "export PATH=$HOME/installed/python2.7/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile

Reload the .bash_profile so that python will be on the path.

    source .bash_profile

Verify that the new python is found in the path

    python --version
    (should print Python 2.7.3)

Install PIP (I followed instructions found here)

    cd ~/installed/compile
    curl http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py | python
    curl https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py | python

Note if the last command fails with certificate issue, run with curl -k

Install django using pip

    pip install django
    pip install flup
    pip install pysqlite  (only sometimes required and only if you are doing sqlite db)

Create directory for website and add necessary files to get apache to pick it up or in this case .htaccess

    AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
    Options +FollowSymLinks
    
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^(media/.*)$ - [L]
    RewriteRule ^(static/.*)$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(django.fcgi)
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ django.fcgi/$1 [L]

django.fcgi

    #!/home/<username>/installed/python2.7/bin/python
    import sys, os
    
    # Add a custom Python path.
    sys.path.insert(0, "/home/<username>/<website-location>")
    
    # Switch to the directory of your project. (Optional.)
    #os.chdir("/home/<username>/<website-location>")
    
    # Set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable.
    os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = "<projectname>.settings"
    
    from django.core.servers.fastcgi import runfastcgi
    runfastcgi(method="threaded", daemonize="false")

Conclusion

So hopefully after following this little tutorial, you too can get the newest version of django up and running on a hosted machine with no root access.