How many times do you need to implement a functionality which has to be run every n seconds and possibly should be stopped and resumed? Not so often probably but it happens and happened to me just today, for this reason I decided to write a mootools Mixin so that I can reuse this code when I need it.

The code

/**
* IntervalController Mixin
* Provides methods to start, stop and resume
* a setInterval functionality
*/
var IntervalController = new Class({
  _started: false ...

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This entry is related to the series "Deploy django applications with nginx, uwsgi, virtualenv, south, git and fabric", the first part here.

So what happens here? Really nothing special, I've changed my working machine and so I had to set up my django projects on the new notebook. This post is only a remainder of the followed steps.

Install all the required system packages

Clearly I had to install some packages in the new machine:

• mysql-server
• python
• python-dev
• python-setuptools
• build-essentials
• libmysqlclient-dev
• git

And also I've installed pip and virtualenv

Create the folder structure and the virtualenv

First of all create a directory which will contain the project, I've created it under /var/www:

$ mkdir /var/www/myproject ...

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Today I was playing (really working) with a nice animation effect to use for the pagination of a showcase module (or stories).

The concept is quite simple here, we have some items which iterates with a nice effect (fade in this case) automatically or not (decided through options). Every item has a dot controller which shows the item when clicked.

Nothing exceptional here, the cool thing is the effect that I gave to such dot controllers, as it seems that when clicking a not selected dot, the selected one moves forward or backward to reach the clicked point.

Quite difficult ...

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Ok, the release 0.2 of moogallery is out!, Check out the updated demo here.

The new release offers some new interesting features:

• Youtube and vimeo videos support
• Audio support, mpeg and ogg encoding to assure cross browser capability
• Mobile detection and swipe event handler to navigate through media in the lightbox view (requires Christoph Pojer's mootools-mobile plugin)

Maybe in the future I'll integrate a listener for the changes in the device orientation so that the gallery reloads recalculating the available dimensions. Such thing may be already done manually.

Check out the new release and comment here to let me know which improvements you'd add to the plugin.

I've just discovered a great thing on django. Like in javascript, it is possible to add dynamically properties to a model instance, and use them inside a template. This is extremely useful in my opinion because saves us from creating a new dictionary mapping the object properties with the addition of the properties that we want to add.

Here a short example: I have a model WorkingPlace which is related to a model Case in the sense that every ...

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Some times ago I wrote about the private static and instance members in mootools classes. Now it's time to speak about the protected members in mootools classes.

So the goal here is to obtain some members which are inherited from the parent class and accessible to a child class but not outside.

The trick is to use the Object.merge function to merge together the private properties of the parent exposed to the children through a protected method and the private properties of the child. Look at the following code:

1. var ids = 1;
2. 
   
3. var myParentClass = (function(){
4. 
   
5.   var _protected_prop = {};
6. 
   
7.   return new Class({
8. 
   
9.     initialize: function(id, par1, par2) {
10.       this.id = id;
11.       ...

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This is the fifth and last part of the django deploy environment, you may find the fourth part here.

In this part we'll see how to automate the deployment using fabric.

What the hell have fabric to do?

Well, fabric have to do all the work for me in the sense that once I've done some changes to my project and pushed them to the bare repository I want to update the production environment with only one command. I'd like also to setup initially the whole environment with only one command.

How does it work?

First of all install it, so with the virtualenv activated:

$ pip install fabric

Done.

Now reading from the official site:

Fabric is a Python (2.5 or higher) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting ...

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This is the fourth part of the django deploy environment, you may find the third part here.

In this part we'll see how to freeze the project requirements, use versioning and prepare all in order to automate the deployment in production with fabric (which will be the argument of the last post, part 5).

Create a requirements.txt

As said in all previous posts, all the packages used by our project have been installed in a virtualenv which is strictly connected to our project. And if you were asking yourself why this is a convenient way to approach the django developement issue here comes the answer.

Activate the virtualenv, go inside the container folder of your django project and then perform this simple command

$ pip freeze > requirements.txt

This command simply creates a requirements.txt files which contains all the project dependencies, look at the image illustrating the project folder structure in the part 2, you'll see the same file there.

The nice part here is that you may setup an equivalent environment, with all the dependencies ...

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This is the third part of the django deploy environment, you may find the second part here.

In this part we'll see how to set up nginx and uwsgi to work with our django project.

Let's install and configure uwsgi

Be sure to have the virtualenv activated (see part 2), and then install uwsgi

$ pip install uwsgi

Ok now we have to configure our project to work with uwsgi, open and edit the myproject/myproject/wsgi.py file, mine looks like this:

"""
WSGI config for sic2012 project.

This module contains the WSGI application used by Django's development server
and any production WSGI deployments. It should expose a module-level variable
named ``application``. Django's ``runserver`` and ``runfcgi`` commands discover
this application via the ``WSGI_APPLICATION`` setting.

Usually you will have the standard Django WSGI application here, but it also
might make sense to replace the whole Django WSGI application with a custom one
that later delegates to the Django one. For example, you could introduce WSGI
middleware here, or combine a Django application with an application of another
framework.

"""
import os ...

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Ok, this is the second part of the django deploy environment, you may find the first part here.

In the prevoius post we have seen how to install nginx webserver an some system packages, both in locale and remote, now it's time to start our developement in locale.

Let's create a new virtualenv

The use of virtualenv is incredibly comfortable and lets you keep separated environment for different projects. So first of all create a new virtualenv in the place you prefer

$ mkdir ~/virtualenv
$ cd ~/virtualenv
$ virtualenv --no-site-packages myproject

Done, now we can activate the virtualenv so that every new python package will be installed in it, so

$ source ~/virtualenv/myproject/bin/activate

MySQL as the database server

Why MySQL? Only because I'm easy with it, I know its syntax, I'm accustomed with it and because I use it at work.
But, since the role of mysql in the whole deploy structure finishes here, you may want to use a different db server, more efficient, lightweight and which uses less system resources

In the first post ...

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