Django on Dreamhost - testing/sand box environment

Question

I've been using webfaction for all my django needs for the last couple of years but have had a high traffic site fall in my lap that dreamhost are probably better suited to handling.

To set up and experiment with a site with webfaction there are your [user].webfactional.com accounts. Which is sweet.

Equivalently Dreamhost also offers [name].dreamhosters.com

Yet this doesn't seem to work with my database and this doesn't seem to be playing nice with setting up django or passenger_wsgi.

So I'm wondering if I'm interpreting the documentation correctly to suggest that in order to make a site that depends on passenger it needs to be running from an active domain. The documentation is really implicit, I'm baffled.

Has anyone set up a testing/sand box environment for django using dreamhost, or know how to?

Answer 1

I've setup a Django site on Dreamhost on a dreamhosters subdomain before so I can tell you for sure it is possible.

I'm not sure what you mean by active domain but I know that you have to set something to the effect of "Allow Passenger for this domain" under "Manage Domains" > "Web Options". Your passenger_wsgi.py file should be placed in ~/[name].dreamhosters.com/ and needs to include all the necessary project/application paths (including the Django source) as well as set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable as described in the Dreamhost wiki. As far as database connections there is nothing special that you have to do in the settings when using Passenger.

On a somewhat related note, I would have to question your statement

...have had a high traffic site fall in my lap that dreamhost are probably better suited to handling.

given that Webfaction is by far the top rated host for Django and Dreamhost the absolute worst according to DjangoFriendly. It's possible that many of the reviews were written when Dreamhost was only supporting FastCGI and things might have improved when using Passenger but I still don't think it beats Webfaction's options of FastCGI, mod_python, and mod_wsgi (which is the recommended deployment setup according to the Django docs http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/howto/deployment/modwsgi/).