Deploying Pyblosxom with Lighttpd and fastcgi

Summary

This walks through install Pyblosxom as a FastCGI application on a Lighttpd web server with mod_fcgi installed.

If you find any issues, please let us know.

If you can help with the documentation efforts, please let us know.

Dependencies

• Lighttpd
• mod_fcgi
• python-flup
• administrative privileges to the server

Deployment

1. Make sure mod_fcgi is installed correctly and working.

2. Create a blog—see the instructions for the blog directories, config.py setup and other bits of Setting up a blog in install_cgi.

3. Create a pyblosxom.wsgi script that looks something like this:

   #!/usr/bin/env python
   # This is the pyblosxom.wsgi script that powers the _______
   # blog.
   
   import sys
   
   def add_to_path(d):
      if d not in sys.path:
         sys.path.insert(0, d)
   
   # call add_to_path with the directory that your config.py lives in.
   add_to_path("/home/joe/blog")
   
   # if you have Pyblosxom installed in a directory and NOT as a
   # Python library, then call add_to_path with the directory that
   # Pyblosxom lives in.  For example, if I untar'd
   # pyblosxom-1.5.tar.gz into /home/joe/, then add like this:
   # add_to_path("/home/joe/pyblosxom-1.5/")
   
   import Pyblosxom.pyblosxom
   application = Pyblosxom.pyblosxom.PyblosxomWSGIApp()
   
   from flup.server.fcgi import WSGIServer
   WSGIServer(application).run()
   

   Don’t forget to make it executable by Lighttpd. I did it like this:

   chown :www-data pyblosxom.wsgi
   chmod g+x pyblosxom.wsgi
   

   This way you change group ownership to the group that lighty belongs to and give all group members execution permission.

4. Create /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/90-myblog.conf with this content:

   server.modules += ( "mod_fastcgi" )
   
   $HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|\.*)yourhost\.com$" {
   
   #### fastcgi module
   ## read fastcgi.txt for more info
   # this line may help with finding what's wrong, check out errorlog file
   fastcgi.debug=1
   fastcgi.server = (
           "/myblog" => (
           "main" => (
           "host" => "127.0.0.1",
           "port" => 3033,
           "check-local" => "disable",
           "max-procs" => 1,
           "bin-path" => "/path/to/pyblosxom.wsgi"
      )
     )
    )
   
   }
   

   You must change yourhost.com to match your domain.

   Fascgi.debug line is useful for finding out why your app doesn’t work. Error messages go to /var/log/lighttpd/errors.log unless configured otherwise. When it all works, set it to 0.

   Change /myblog to the url path you want your blog to live at. If you want it at root node (like http://yourhost.com/ ), set it to /.

   Select any not used port number.

   Checkout what check-local and max-procs mean in Lighttpd docs.

   Change /path/to/pyblosxom.wsgi to be the absolute path to the .wsgi file set up in step 3.

5. Now you can enable and disable this part of configuration with lighttpd-enable-mod and lighttpd-disable-mod, so now do:

   lighttpd-enable-mod myblog
   service lighttpd force-reload
   

Note

Any time you make changes to Pyblosxom (update, add plugins, change configuration), you’ll have to force-reload configuration of Lighttpd.