Comments on: Multi Trac / Django Hosting with mod_wsgi

By: crashcrash07

crashcrash07 — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:34:21 +0000

From the beginning your blog was trash. But now it is great. I hope you gonna keep writing that way.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:51:09 +0000

Thanks for posting this. It inspired me to pursue the (much less ambitious) project of converting a small Trac-managed repo from Subversion to Mercurial. It only took a few minutes, all history was preserved via hgsvn, and it seems to be working great.

By: Armin Ronacher

Armin Ronacher — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:16:26 +0000

The biggest advantage is certainly that it gracefully kills the processes after n requests. That ensures that if the application is leaky, it won’t trash the server. And other big advantage is that you have one possible point of failure less because you don’t need the python module that connects to FastCGI. You just have mod_wsgi which looks for the file you defined in the apache config and all the rest is controlled from the apache config.

No daemon process you have to kill yourself (the ruby guys from eins.de for example use fastcgi for their rails hosting and wrote a script that kill processes that life longer than 30 minutes etc.) and no daemon process you have to start yourself (although apache is able to manage your fastcgi processes).

Of course there are disadvantages too. You have the same problem like with any other mod_foobar module i guess. So don’t let two applications in your apache link to different versions of the same library, don’t expect that mod_wsgi works on lighttpd.

But nonetheless my favorite hosting solution for the moment.

By: BrD

BrD — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:04:20 +0000

Are there advantages with mod_wsgi in comparison with fastcgi+suexec?

By: Armin Ronacher

Armin Ronacher — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:35:47 +0000

Right. One could check with RewriteCond /filename/ -f. Haven’t thought about that and assemble full paths directly from the config. So many ways :-)

By: Graham Dumpleton

Graham Dumpleton — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 02:43:45 +0000

BTW, you shouldn’t need:

WSGIPassAuthorization On

This is because Apache is handling authentication and not Trac. All Trac needs to see passed through is the REMOTE_USER variable which will still be passed even if WSGIPassAuthorization is not set to On.

By: Graham Dumpleton

Graham Dumpleton — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 01:24:34 +0000

To use mod_rewrite to check for the actual existence of a Trac instance, see example right at the bottom of:

http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/IntegrationWithTrac

This means you do not have to do it in the WSGI script file.

I don’t have my mod_rewrite book with me at the moment so I can look up how to do it, but instead of returning Forbidden, you could even possibly have it redirect to some index page listing available sites. The rewrite rules can probably also be comprised into one group to avoid having to match the URL more than once by using [S] modifier to RewriteRule. When I can look up the book and work out how to clean it up, I’ll fix the example.