Codegrind

I hope that I finally got it right, since I can see the admin interface and the media files are being served by the same development server as the site. The machine is an Intel MacBook running OS X 10.5.6 and python 2.6.1 I suggest reading the official Django documentation on setting it with up mod_python first. I hope that this article can fill in the gaps. Remember to change the paths and names to the ones that you use.

Configure the virtual hosts

In this case 'mysite' is the name of the virtual host and 'my_site' is the name of the project, and server root directory. The server root was in my /Users/discodancer/Dev/my_site directory

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin jordanovskid@gmail.com
  DocumentRoot "/Users/discodancer/Dev/my_site"
  ServerName mysite
  ServerAlias mysite
  ErrorLog "/private/var/log/apache2/my_site-error_log"
  CustomLog "/private/var/log/apache2/my_site-access_log" common

  <Directory "/Users/discodancer/Dev/my_site">
    Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews Includes
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
  <Location "/">
    SetHandler mod_python
    SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE my_site.settings
    PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
    PythonPath sys.path+['/Users/discodancer/Dev/']
  </Location>

  # Do not use python interpreter for /media
  <Location "/media">
    SetHandler none
  </Location>

  # Do not use python interpreter for images
  <LocationMatch ".(jpg|gif|png)$">
    SetHandler None
  </LocationMatch>
</VirtualHost>

Then, to allow serving of media files, you need to make a symlink from django's contrib/admin/media directory to your project. The apache user normally does not have privileges to the django installation, so you need to do this.

ln -s /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/
contrib/admin/media/Users/discodancer/Dev/my_site/media

(the path is too long, try not to paste the line breaks in your terminal :) Then make a file apache_settings.py in your project directory/server root and paste these lines in it:

import osos.environ['PYTHON_EGG_CACHE'] = '/Users/discodancer/Temp'

The path in my case is writable by the webserver (anyone for that matter). Finally add these 2 lines in the apache httpd.conf file. They will tell apache to load the settings from the file you just created.

PythonInterpreter my_site
PythonImport /Users/discodancer/Dev/my_site/apache_settings.py my_site

Restart the web server. I suppose you already know, but the apache httpd.conf file can be found in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and the virtual hosts file can be found in /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf. This should work :) at least it did for me. One more note: at the moment of writing there is no current MySQLdb module for python 2.6. I am using the one that works with python 2.5 and each time I import it it throws a warning that the sets module is deprecated. Just ignore this, it didn't cause any trouble to me. If someone can explain what it really means, i'd be grateful.