Hosting a Django Site with Apache/Ubuntu

Question

I'm having issues trying to deploy my first Django app on ubuntu/Apache. I've followed the guides on djangoproject.com and scoured the internet looking for answers and I'm stuck. I have the basics up and running, but when I try to visit my site (twilightinternal.com) I get the following error:

ImportError: Could not import settings 'twilight_boutique.settings' (Is it on sys.path? Does it have syntax errors?): No module named twilight_boutique.settings

My django code lives in the /root/django_projects/twilight_boutique folder

I have the following information in my sites-available/twilightinternal:

<VirtualHost *>
        ServerAdmin shawn@coldfeetstudios.com
        ServerName www.twilightinternal.com
        ServerAlias twilightinternal.com

        DirectoryIndex index.html
        DocumentRoot /var/www/twilightinternal/

        ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
        <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
                AllowOverride None
                Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </Directory>

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

        # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
        # alert, emerg.
        LogLevel warn

        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

        <Location "/">
                SetHandler python-program
                PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
                SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE twilight_boutique.settings
                PythonOption django.root /root/django_projects/twilight_boutique
                PythonDebug Off
                PythonPath "['/root/django_projects', '/var/www'] + sys.path"
        </Location>

</VirtualHost>   

I'm really stuck and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

First, you should use mod_wsgi if you can or FastCGI as a fallback option.

Your Apache settings look correct, so it is probably your settings.py. It is very likely a permissions problem. Is there a particular reason you are running it from /root? Typically, apache does not run as root and will not be able to read any files under /root. Try moving the project to another location.

If that doesn't help, here are some other debugging steps to try.

Does the development server work properly?

cd /root/django_projects/twilight_boutique
python manage.py runserver

If that fails, you have a syntax error in your settings file.

You could also try using the python shell to try to debug this. Run python from any directory and run the following code:

import sys
sys.path.insert(0, '/root/django_projects')
import twilight_boutique.settings