Eternity SW

From here to eternity

Being a few words describing an ISV journey …

2006-08-13 : Webfaction and Snake Oil

Most of you won't realise is that Eternity Software is hosted by Webfaction (formerly Python Hosting). These guys do a terrific job, promptly responding to my ignorant requests of "why won't this work?" and "how do I do this?" with "Push this here, pull that lever over there and everything will just fall into place."

Sometimes however, even with their help, getting a basic thing done when you don't know enough is a little tough. For the record, here's how to install a Python egg on a Webfaction shared account.

First login to your shell account and download the virtual-python script from PEAK. Webfaction conveniently have the lib and bin directories already setup, but I needed to create the include directory as described on the PEAK site about Custom Installations. This is what PEAK refer to as a "Virtual Python Installation" (recommended as the install to have when you can't install to the python directories). Webfaction are running both python 2.3 (default) and 2.4 so make your choice by selecting the version, eg /usr/local/bin/python2.4 virtual-server.py.

The virtualisation appears to make ~/bin/python equivalent to /usr/bin/python so now I am running python 2.4. Cool.

Next download ez_setup.py from PEAK, and execute ~/bin/python ez_setup.py.

Finally get your eggs, using any of the standard egg install methods. In my case I wanted SQLObject, specifically 0.7.0, so I downloaded that egg to a temp directory and installed with ~/bin/easy_install ~/temp/SQLObject-0.7.0-py2.4.egg.