problems doing the Django tutorial on Dreamhost using Passengers

Question

I have looked and I could not find this question before, and it surprises me.

I am reasonably proficient in Python, and I used Dreamhost for a number of years. Now I would like to learn Django. They are finally supporting it using Passenger. Which I do not know what is.

Following the instructions on Dreamhost I installed Django. Then I started following the tutorial 01. This went well, except that I could not start the server (this in the tutorial) since the code was live on dreamhost. At the time this did not seem to make any difference. Then when I went on the second part of the tutorial I had to access the admin site. And it worked well going to myurl/admin/ , as it should. But here the problems started. According to the tutorial (here) I have to add a file in the poll application and then restart the server. But I never started the server in the first place, my code is running live on the web... but when I add a file the website the admin acts as if it does not see it.

Probably dreamhost has started its own server, and I don't know how to restart it. But I assume this is going to be a common problem when you run django on dreamhost. Every time you add a file you will have to tell the server to consider it.

So what should I do to let the server know about it?

Thanks, Pietro

Answer 1

For the tutorial, you should be working on a local machine, not a web server.

Answer 2

Here's the relevant section of the Passenger user's guide for restarting Passenger:

http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide.html#_redeploying_restarting_the_ruby_on_rails_application

Answer 3

Eventually I got the answer from the DH support service. They told me to

pkill python

I did it. I also checked with

ps -aux

what process I was running. And indeed I could see the python process starting when I went to the page, and being killed when I pkilled it.

Thanks for all that helped.