Web2py

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Web2py is a Python web framework. It seems very user-friendly and has a feature I haven't seen on similar ones: in-page code editing. This means you can manage your entire application via web.

Unfortunately it has limited installation instructions, at least for shared-hosting environments. Thus the creation of this page.

Necessary steps:

• Install Python 2.5 by following this wiki page
• Install setuptools
• Run easy_install Flup
• Download and extract web2py
• Run python web2py.py to create the necessary framework files
• Create a file dispatch.fcgi at the root of web2py directory with the following content:

#!/home/youruserhere/run/bin/python
import sys
from flup.server.fcgi_fork import WSGIServer
import gluon.main
application=gluon.main.wsgibase
## or
# application=gluon.main.wsgibase_with_logging
WSGIServer(application).run()

• make this file executable by typing chmod +x dispatch.fcgi
• create or add the following lines to .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^dispatch\.fcgi/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi/$1 [L]

Now try and access the sub/domain on your browser and it should work!

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Addendum

You will note that you will not be able to access the admin page unless you're using SSL. This is however easy to circumvent by editing /applications/admin/models/access.py

Also, for the database administration to work you will have to edit /applications/your_app_name/controllers/appadmin.py (you'll have to do this for every app).

comment lines:

elif remote_addr not in hosts:
   raise HTTP(200, T('appadmin is disabled because insecure channel'))

and duplicate parameters_8000.py as parameters_80.py. But note that this is not recomended!!!

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python 2.6

I installed python 2.6.1 and although it complained during the make stage it is working fine and actually seems faster than 2.5.2. The modules it wasn't able to build were:

_bsddb             _tkinter           bsddb185        
bz2                dbm                readline        
sunaudiodev

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Ease way using WSGI Here are the steps I took to get web2py working with wsgi:

1. I installed my own python distro so I could use 2.6. I don't know if this is neccessary.
2. Created a subdomain like: web2py.mydomain.com. When creating the new domain, make sure to check enable "Ruby on Rails Passenger" or mod_rails.
3. I svn checkedout a fresh web2py right into my domain's root (/home/username/web2py.mydomain.com). Note, this isn't the public directory. The previous step requires you to set a subdirectory as the public directory.
4. I created a symlink as follows: ln -s wsgihandler.py passenger_wsgi.py. This is neccessary because the rails stuff looks for this file.
5. And last, but not least, so that wsgihandler uses my 2.6 version of python, I added the following to wsgihandler.py near to the top:

import sys
import os

INTERP = "/home/username/opt/bin/python"
if sys.executable != INTERP: os.execl(INTERP, INTERP, *sys.argv)

For more info on this subject, see Passenger_WSGI

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If anyone is aware of a paid-for-hosting service that supports web2py, please edit this page. This approach would save much admin hassles for many.