Το φιτρί αγόρι (colourful life)

I’ve chosen Hostmonster as a shared hosting provider for one my projects using Django. I’ve been using hostmonster for this blog so I wanted to give it a try for more professional matters. The problem is that hostmonster is not django/python friendly. I’ve found the following problems:

• No subversion (svn) client.
• Old python without mysql support.
• Of course, no Django support.

As you can see:

$ python -V
Python 2.3.4
$ svn
-bash: svn: command not found

But not supported doesn’t mean impossible. You can have your python 2.5 and Django from subversion (And everything you want to install). You only need to install the software we need from scratch. If you want to know how, just read the rest of this entry.

Read the rest of this entry »

Installing the python library for MySQL in Leopard can be a bit tricky. If you’re an easy_install lover, the first thing to try would be:

$ sudo easy_install MySQL-python

But the results you’ll obtain will be not very encouraging.

Searching for MySQL-python
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/MySQL-python/
Reading http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python
Reading http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python/
Best match: MySQL-python 1.2.2
Downloading http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mysql-python/MySQL-python-1.2.2.tar.gz
Processing MySQL-python-1.2.2.tar.gz
Running MySQL-python-1.2.2/setup.py -q bdist_egg –dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-07GTpt/MySQL-python-1.2.2/egg-dist-tmp-t78bko
In file included from /opt/local/include/mysql5/mysql/mysql.h:47,
from _mysql.c:40:
/usr/include/sys/types.h:92: error: duplicate ‘unsigned’
/usr/include/sys/types.h:92: error: two or more data types in declaration specifiers
In file included from /opt/local/include/mysql5/mysql/mysql.h:47,
from _mysql.c:40:
/usr/include/sys/types.h:92: error: duplicate ‘unsigned’
/usr/include/sys/types.h:92: error: two or more data types in declaration specifiers
lipo: can’t open input file: /var/tmp//cczla7iC.out (No such file or directory)
error: Setup script exited with error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1

But the solution is there. As you can see, the command talks about an error in line 40 for some file called _mysql.c. We’re going to get to that file and remove one line.

First we need to download the package. We will use easy_install, but later. So now grab your wget or your browser to here. And when you have the file, uncompress it (terminal or through finder).

$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mysql-python/MySQL-python-1.2.2.tar.gz
…
$ tar xzf MySQL-python-1.2.2.tar.gz

Now go to the directory that has just been created and open the file _mysql.c. Go to the line number 38.

35 #include “my_config.h”
36 #endif
37 #ifndef uint
38 #define uint unsigned int
39 #endif
40 #include “mysql.h”

Delete line 38, save and install your modified egg from the parent directory with:

$ easy_install MySQL-python-1.2.2
Processing MySQL-python-1.2.2
Running setup.py -q bdist_egg –dist-dir /Users/alff/tmp/MySQL-python-1.2.2/egg-dist-tmp-S4uIM7
ld: warning in /opt/local/lib/mysql5/mysql/libmysqlclient_r.dylib, file is not of required architecture
ld: warning in /opt/local/lib/libz.dylib, file is not of required architecture
ld: warning in /opt/local/lib/libssl.dylib, file is not of required architecture
ld: warning in /opt/local/lib/libcrypto.dylib, file is not of required architecture
zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents…
Adding MySQL-python 1.2.2 to easy-install.pth file
.
Installed /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.2-py2.5-macosx-10.5-i386.egg
Processing dependencies for MySQL-python==1.2.2
Finished processing dependencies for MySQL-python==1.2.2

The problem was that _mysql.c defined the type unit and that type is defined again when it includes the file mysql.h. We remove the duplicate, the compiler is happy

Edit: If you installed mysql5 with MacPorts, and you get the error EnvironmentError: mysql_config not found when installing the egg. Just add a link from mysql_config to mysql_config5.

# which mysql_config5
/opt/local/bin/mysql_config5
# cd /opt/local/bin/
# ln -s mysql_config5 mysql_config