Installing latest django on server with no root access

So I am going to talk about what I needed to do get the lastest django (1.4) working on site5.

1. 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


2. Download Python 2.7 (Currently django 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, but in theory this should work with any future releases as well.

3. Compiling and install Python 2.7 (non root user)

cd Python-2.7.3
./configure PREFIX=
make install DESTDIR=/home/<username>/installed/python2.7


4. 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 ~
vim .bash_profile


add $HOME/installed/pythong2.7/bin to the PATH defined in .bash_profile

PATH=$HOME/installed/python2.7/bin:$PATH
export PATH


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

source .bash_profile


6. Verify that the new python is found in the path

python --version
(should print Python 2.7.3)


7. 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

8. Install django using pip

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


9. Create directory for website and add necessary files to get apache to pick it up

.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")


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 ;-)