Migrating an Existing Django Project to Calloway

For Starters

To start off, make sure you are using virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper. If you have not already done so, install them:

pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

Then create a new virtual environment for your new Calloway based project:

mkvirtualenv newproject

Note

Make sure to change your the shbang (first line) in your project’s manage.py to point to the newly installed copy of python in your virtual environment. It should be something like: #!/home/user/.virtualenvs/newproject/bin/python

Activate your new virtual environment and install the Calloway app:

workon newproject
pip install calloway

This will install a load of dependencies along with it. To see the full list for future reference, you can generate a requirements file:

generate_reqs > requirements.txt

Settings

In your project’s settings.py make the following changes. Add this bit to the top of the file so that the Calloway apps are on your sys.path:

import os, sys
import calloway

CALLOWAY_ROOT = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(calloway.__file__))
sys.path.insert(0, os.path.join(CALLOWAY_ROOT, 'apps'))

Then import the default Calloway settings:

from calloway.settings import *

Now you can alter your INSTALLED_APPS setting to include the Calloway application bundles. Prepend your local apps with the bundles like so:

INSTALLED_APPS = APPS_CORE + \
    APPS_ADMIN + \
    APPS_STAFF + \
    APPS_REVERSION + \
    APPS_STORIES + \
    APPS_CALLOWAY_DEFAULT + \
    APPS_MPTT + \
    APPS_CATEGORIES + \
    APPS_COMMENT_UTILS + \
    APPS_FRONTEND_ADMIN + \
    APPS_MEDIA + \
    APPS_UTILS + \
    APPS_REGISTRATION + \
    APPS_TINYMCE + \
    ( # Local apps here
        "cheese_shop",
        "dead_parrot",
        "holy_grail",
    )

Now you can adjust your media settings. Below is an example of how to setup the media where the static folder contains all of your project’s assets and the media folder is where the new media is copied into for serving. For more information on media handling, checkout Media Configuration

try:
    from local_settings import MEDIA_URL_PREFIX
except ImportError:
    MEDIA_URL_PREFIX = "http://media.example.com/"
try:
    from local_settings import MEDIA_ROOT_PREFIX
except ImportError:
    MEDIA_ROOT_PREFIX = '/var/www/media'
try:
    from local_settings import MEDIA_ROOT
except ImportError:
    MEDIA_ROOT = os.path.join(MEDIA_ROOT_PREFIX, 'ugc')
try:
    from local_settings import STATIC_ROOT
except ImportError:
    STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(MEDIA_ROOT_PREFIX, 'static')


MEDIA_URL = '%sugc/' % MEDIA_URL_PREFIX
STATIC_URL = "%sstatic/" % MEDIA_URL_PREFIX
STATIC_MEDIA_APP_MEDIA_PATH = STATIC_ROOT
STATIC_MEDIA_COPY_PATHS = (
    {'from': os.path.join(CALLOWAY_ROOT, 'media'), 'to': STATIC_ROOT},
    {'from': 'static', 'to': STATIC_ROOT},
)
STATIC_MEDIA_COMPRESS_CSS = not DEBUG
STATIC_MEDIA_COMPRESS_JS = not DEBUG
STATIC_MEDIA_PURGE_OLD_FILES = False

Then make sure you add the default Calloway templates:

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    'templates',
    ...
) + CALLOWAY_TEMPLATE_DIRS

The last bits you need to consider is middleware. Again here is an example of MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES that play nicely with Calloway:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'django.middleware.cache.UpdateCacheMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.gzip.GZipMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.http.ConditionalGetMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.doc.XViewMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.redirects.middleware.RedirectFallbackMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.flatpages.middleware.FlatpageFallbackMiddleware',
    'pagination.middleware.PaginationMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.transaction.TransactionMiddleware',
    'ban.middleware.DenyMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.cache.FetchFromCacheMiddleware',
)

And finally there are some settings you could define in local_settings.py which should make life a bit easier including media:

CACHE_BACKEND = "dummy:///"
MEDIA_ROOT_PREFIX = 'media'
MEDIA_URL_PREFIX = '/media/'
MEDIA_ROOT = 'uploads'
ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/media/static/admin/'

URLs

Now you can add the Calloway urlpatterns onto your existing patterns in urls.py:

from calloway.urls import urlpatterns as calloway_patterns

urlpatterns += calloway_patterns

If you also want the catch all categories app to start at the site root, add this line:

urlpatterns += patterns('', ('', include('categories.urls')))

Lastly you can setup a development media server to host your assets:

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += patterns('django.views.static',
        (r'^media/static/(?P<path>.*)$', 'serve',
            {'document_root': settings.STATIC_ROOT, 'show_indexes': True}),
    )