Re: Advice on distutils and distribution policies
- From: Magnus Lycka <lycka@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 20:08:24 +0100
Mardy wrote:
....Hi, I've built a small project (http://eligante.sf.net) which I'm actually trying to package using distutils.
However, I don't know if this directory layout is suitable for site-packages, since at a first glance it looks to me that datafiles might not be welcome under it. Is it so?
In general, it's a good idea to keep code and data separated:
- Different people might need to access code and data. People who add content to a web site shouldn't be able to make a mess of the software that controls that web site (or vice versa). - Lifecycles are different, so different backup strategies might apply. - Directory structures such as /usr under unix are typically fairly static on production systems, and there might be assumptions that required space doesn't grow over time, whereas data, kept under /var is expected to change more over time. Also, if e.g. web content is kept in a separate disk partition, filling that partition won't mess up other parts of the computer system. - It should be easy to upgrade the software without messing up data. It's practical if it's safe to e.g. do "rm -rf /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/eligante" followed by a new "python setup.py install" in case a sys admin thinks that his old install was broken.
For a CGI-based app on e.g. a linux box with Apache, I think it would be typical to partition things like this:
In an apache cgi-bin directory: The main Python CGI script(s) that are called by the web server. These might be scripts that are modified as a part of the installation process to e.g. point out data files. These should be short files. Import a module, set up configuration and run something in the imported module.
Under /usr/lib/python2.x/site-packages/ you keep the bulk of your software (as described above).
HTML and CSS files that are to be handled directly by the web browser is placed under Apache's DOCUMENT_ROOT etc. E.g. $DOCUMENT_ROOT/eligante.
Data files that are read and processed by you own programs (i.e. not directly by the web server) van be anywhere under /var, e.g. /var/eligante.
In that case, where should I move the .html files, and how should I access them from inside python?
Asolute path defined by an environment variable?
I think Apache defines a DOCUMENT_ROOT variable. You could decide that your HTML files etc should reside in some particular place relative to DOCUMENT_ROOT, and use something like...
import os SUB_FOLDER = 'my_folder' dir = os.path.join(os.environ['DOCUMENT_ROOT'],SUB_FOLDER)
....to locate your files.
As I wrote above, hardcoding in a main CGI-script is also common practice. .
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