Why do I get error, Invalid command 'PythonHandler'?

Question

I'm trying to deploy a Django application, but I've hit a brick wall. On Debian (latest), I've run these commands so far:

apt-get install apache2 apache2-doc apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils libexpat1 ssl-cert libapache2-mod-python python-django

I've tried adding the module manually in the Apache 2 config files, but to be honest I'm totally lost. It's totally different to Apache version 1 which I used years ago.

Syntax error on line 7 of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:
Invalid command 'PythonHandler', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

I've added the following to my sites-available/default file, between the tags.

    <Location "/">
              SetHandler python-program
              PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
              SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE hellodjango1.settings
              PythonDebug Off
    </Location>

Here's what tutorials I've used so far, without much luck:

• Django | How to use Django with Apache and mod_python | Django Documentation
• How To Install Django On Debian Etch (Apache2/mod_python)

Answer 1

Have you enabled mod_python.load in mods-enabled? You can do this by just creating a softlink to the same file in mods-available.

Answer 2

more easy way to do it

a2enmod python

Answer 3

If you're using Gentoo, define -D PYTHON in /etc/conf.d/apache2

Answer 4

On ubuntu, you need to:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-python

Answer 5

Looks like I had to manually create the python.load file, weird. Anyway, these two commands fixed it:

echo "LoadModule python_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_python.so" > /etc/apache2/mods-available/python.load
ln -s ../mods-available/python.load etc/apache2/mods-enabled/python.load