This tutorial is built off of The Django Setup Guide from the textuser wiki.

Alternative Instructions: Check the step-by-step Django, Accelerated tutorial from http://www.b-list.org/ for building a Django setup, using pkgsrc.

If you haven’t already, upgrade the currently installed packages:

yes | sudo pkg-get upgrade

I needed to first point my pkg-get to a different server as noted in this forum post. I’ll included those instructions here as well.

first edit /opt/csw/etc/pkg-get.conf. For all the file edits in this tutorial you can use the nano command:

sudo nano /opt/csw/etc/pkg-get.conf

you need to change:

url=http://uma.textdrive.com/blastwave/unstable

in opt/csw/etc/pkg-get.conf to:

url=http://ibiblio.org/pub/packages/solaris/csw/unstable

then save the file and get the packages you need (you may need to run the update command again):

sudo pkg-get -i ap2_modpython
sudo pkg-get -i pymysql

These instructions are for the current SVN (trunk) copy of Django.

cd ~
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django_src
sudo ln -s `pwd`/django_src/django /opt/csw/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django
sudo ln -s `pwd`/django_src/django/bin/django-admin.py /opt/csw/bin/django-admin.py

add these lines to ~/.bashrc

alias python='/opt/csw/bin/python2.3'
export PYTHONPATH=.:/opt/csw/lib/python2.3/site-packages/

when you are done run:

rehash

sudo groupadd web 
sudo useradd -g web -s /usr/bin/bash web
sudo passwd web

choose a password for the web user.

I put my media in my /home/admin/ directory so I could easly access it over SFTP as the admin user. Here is how to do that:

first create a symlink between a media directory (create this in your /home/admin/ folder) and pythons site-packages:

sudo ln -s /home/admin/project_media /opt/csw/lib/python2.3/site-packages/project

you might also want to have the django admin media into this directory, I did this with another symlink:

sudo ln -s /opt/csw/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media /home/admin/project_media/django

In /opt/csw/apache2/etc/includes/dso.conf add:

LoadModule python_module libexec/mod_python.so

Add a Virtual Host file to /opt/csw/apache2/etc/virtualhosts/ (mine was in the format “project.com.conf”)

<VirtualHost xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:80>
ServerName project.com
DocumentRoot /home/admin/project_media/
ErrorLog /var/log/project.com-error.log
CustomLog /var/log/project.com-access.log common
<Directory /home/admin/project_media>
allow from all
Options -Indexes
</Directory>
SetHandler python-program
PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE project.settings
PythonDebug Off
<Location "/media">
    SetHandler None
</Location>
Alias /media /home/admin/project_media
</VirtualHost>

Put your Django application in the /opt/csw/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ directory.

if you setup your media the way I described above edit your project’s settings.py file like this:

MEDIA_ROOT = '/home/admin/project_media/'
ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = 'http://project.com/media/django/'
MEDIA_URL = 'http://project.com/media'

sudo apachectl restart