How To Remove Depilatory Wax From Clothing

OpenWRT + Lighttpd + FastCGI + Django


Introduction

Here's something I was fighting with for about 3 days. At first I wanted to use virtualenv too, but it all resulted in a headache. I'm a novice in these matters, so forgive me.

Recently I bought a router TP-Link WR-1043ND. Not the best choice now, I'm aware: TP-Link MR3420 has higher quality to price ratio. Anyway, my router got upgraded to OpenWRT, version Backfire 10.3-RC4, thanks to great work of
Cezary Jackiewicz aka Obsy .

Installation

Opkg packages First packages that we can install with OpenWRT package manager: lighttpd, lighttpd-mod-alias, lighttpd-mod-rewrite, lighttpd-mod-fcgi - packages needed for http server called lighty

pysqlite, libsqlite3 - the database

python wasn't installed at first, so we'll need this too

opkg install lighttpd lighttpd-mod-alias lighttpd-mod-rewrite lighttpd-mod-fcgi

opkg python libsqlite3 pysqlite

Python packages

These will be installed from Python Package Index (PyPI).We will need:

setuptools - Go to pypi.python.org, search for setuptools, follow the instructions.

• pip - We should be able to call:
easy_install pip
• to obtain it.
• django - With pip in place getting django is as easy as
pip install django

. Pip, contrary to easy_install, has a nice uninstall option.

  
 flup - For FastCGI related stuff 

There we go. It's all installed.

Configuration

3 ways of doing this
• First of all, let me briefly explain how FastCGI works. Actually this might not be a good idea to believe me, because, as I said, I'm a layman in this matters. There are 3 entities in this process: the browser, the server (Lighttpd), the FastCGI process (Django).
First step is forwarding the http request for a webpage to FastCGI process:
• Browser => Lighttpd => Django FCGI Request is processed and Django returns html source code of a webpage. Shove it back to your browser and render it. Browser
• I came to conclusion that there are 3 ways of setting this up. By bin-path
By host and port
By socket

My app's directory:

/www/apps/homepage

. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. It's ok to use brand new project created with

django-admin.py startproject homepage
.

Bin-path

  <= Lighttpd <= Django FCGI

This method is my favourite so far. We tell lighttpd where to find executable file .fcgi and it starts FCGI processes by itself. All we need to take care of now is that the server is started after reboot. Here are the details:

Contents of .fcgi file. It sits at the django project's directory.
#!/usr/bin/env python
3. import sys, os

# Add a custom Python path.

sys.path.insert(0, "/www/apps") # Set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable. os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = "homepage.settings"

from django.core.servers.fastcgi import runfastcgi

# maxspare=2 is minimum from what i saw

runfastcgi(method="threaded", daemonize="false", maxspare=2)

Lighttpd config file from /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. It is edited version of default config file. I just omitted most of commented out lines.
• # lighttpd configuration file
  #

   ## modules to load 
   # all other module should only be loaded if really  neccesary 
   # - saves some time 
   # - saves memory 
   server.modules = (  
    "mod_rewrite",  
   # "mod_redirect",  
    "mod_alias",  
   # "mod_auth",  
   # "mod_status",  
   # "mod_setenv", 
    "mod_fastcgi", 

  # "mod_proxy",
# "mod_simple_vhost",
• # "mod_cgi",

   # "mod_ssi", 
   # "mod_usertrack", 
   # "mod_expire", 
   # "mod_webdav" 
   ) 
    
   # force use of the "write" backend (closes: #2401) 
   server.network-backend = "write" 
    
   ## a static document-root, for virtual-hosting take look at the  
   ## server.virtual-*  options 
   server.document-root = "/www/public" 
    
   ## where to send error-messages to 
   server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log" 
    
   ## files to check for if .../ is requested 
   index-file.names = ( "index.html", "default.html", "index.htm", "default.htm" ) 
    
   ## mimetype mapping 
   mimetype.assign = (   
    ".pdf"   => "application/pdf", 
    ".class" => "application/octet-stream", 
    ".pac"   => "application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig", 
    ".swf"   => "application/x-shockwave-flash", 
    ".wav"   => "audio/x-wav", 
    ".gif"    => "image/gif", 
    ".jpg"   => "image/jpeg", 
    ".jpeg"  => "image/jpeg", 
    ".png"   => "image/png", 
    ".css"   => "text/css", 
    ".html"  => "text/html", 
    ".htm"   => "text/html", 
    ".js"    => "text/javascript", 
    ".txt"   => "text/plain", 
    ".dtd"   => "text/xml", 
    ".xml"   => "text/xml" 
    ) 
    
   $HTTP["url"] =~ "\.pdf$" { 
    server.range-requests = "disable" 
   } 
    
   ## 
   # which extensions should not be handle  via static-file transfer 
   # 
   # .php, .pl, .fcgi are most often handled by mod_fastcgi or mod_cgi 
   static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" ) 
    
   ## to help the rc.scripts 
   server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid" 
    
   #### fastcgi module 
   ## read fastcgi.txt for more info 
   # this line may help with finding what's wrong, check out errorlog file 
   # fastcgi.debug=1 
   fastcgi.server = ( 
    "/homepage.fcgi" => ( 
     "main" => ( 
      "host" => "127.0.0.1", 
      "port" => 3033, 
      "check-local" => "disable", 
       "max-procs" => 1, 
      "bin-path" => "/www/apps/homepage/homepage.fcgi" 
     ) 
    ) 
   ) 
    
   alias.url = ( 
                   "/media" => "/www/apps/homepage/media", 
           ) 
    
   url.rewrite-once = ( 
                   "^(/media.*)$" => "$1", 
                   "^/favicon\.ico$" => "/media/favicon.ico", 
                   "^(/.*)$" => "/homepage.fcgi$1", 
           ) 
    
    
    
    
   Host:port 
    
   You don't need .fcgi file in this method. Remove line with "bin-path" in fastcgi.server  section of lighttpd config. Now you need to make sure that you run this at every boot (maybe you can use start-stop-daemon tool for this): 
   /www/apps/homepage/manage.py runfcgi method=threaded host="127.0.0.1" port=3033 
   This will start FastCGI threads. Lighttpd will expect them to be there when he needs a page. Otherwise you'll get 503 or 500. This method is said to be easier because there is no need to set permissions on TCP socket. 
    
   Socket 
    
   In this method FCGI process and HTTP Server communicate through a socket (aka named pipe). Proper permissions must be in place. FCGI file is also not needed here. You must make sure that you run similar command as in the second method: 
   /www/apps/homepage/manage.py  runfcgi method=threaded socket=/www/apps/homepage/homepage.socket 
   Lines in fastcgi.server with port and host get removed. Instead add  
   "socket" => "/www/apps/homepage/homepage.socket" 
    
    

  Conclusion

I use a lot of bad practices here:

do everything as root

 not using virtualenv 

keeping my app in /www (but I changed my document-root, so maybe I'm ok?)

This is an example of work done by someone who came from "no idea" to "it started working" and all this happens on a router that won't be under a lot of load or work in a cloud of virtual machines. Certainly it's not state of the art, but gets the job done.

 There's quite a lot of this kind of tutorials, but to someone without proper knowledge all these terms and blindly followed instructions are no good if something doesn't work as expected. I hope someone will find the wording I used useful. I hope will when I'll need to do everything all over again.