DARUSHIMO

rackspace and heroku fail UPDATE: NOT A FAIL!

just a rundown over the past 24 hours:

I want to get a website up. fast.

I compared server services. my own virtual box (linode) vs vitual space (rackspace) vs Platform-as-a-Service (heroku). I don’t need my own whole box, and i couldn’t figure out heroku’s pricing, so rackspace seemed to be the best option.

started with rackspace. spent all last night trying to config a remote Ubuntu “image”(?) to work with django. I was roadblocked when some value in my setup process for MySQL was set to ‘YES’ rather than whatever value I was trying to pass. (Note: it’s rather demoralizing when you get an error because a value is set to ‘YES’ and you don’t know why or how to change it. In this instance, ‘YES’ means ‘NO’) Crashed late last night.

Woke up today. Read a hn article from a pre-lawyer who went to hacker school here in NYC about learning to dev web apps. he suggests heroku, and i read more to find out that they can be very inexpensive/free. Great. I’m into the idea of PaaS, generally, because I don’t know any sys admin stuff, and although I’d like to learn, that’s not my current goal.

So i get started with heroku again. I’m happy to be wielding git at all. I’m creating a virtualenv. I’m pushing to heroku. (“This django on heroku tutorial seems to be going well!”) And then…well i get near the end of the tutorial. My “requirements.txt” looks ridiculous (thanks to celery, i think), not all of those required libraries seem to be available, and i can’t get a worker up and running.

No distributions at all found for ex47==0.0.1 (from -r requirements.txt (line 13))

       Storing complete log in /app/.pip/pip.log

 !     Heroku push rejected, failed to compile Python/django app

DARUSHIMO$ heroku scale worker=1

Scaling worker processes…  !    No such type as worker

Then I realize: “What’s a worker?”

So I’m sitting here, tired, just wanting to push a django app into the internetspace so I can start developing for production, and, gall darn, I feel like I’m back to square one. Do i keep trying with heroku? Do I try to ‘debug’ my rackspace MySQL problems? Do I just use the 1and1 shared hosting I have, hoping that it will be easier to manage even if the resulting site is slower? 

The goal was to have a django web app up and running by wednesday, but it’s monday now and I don’t have a line of code for the application. seems like it’s unlikely that I will at this point.

But that’s ok. I’m going to regroup. I got through the django tutorial on djangoproject.com a couple of days ago and got a good sense of wtf i was going to be doing. I think instead of trying to get something up and running, i’ll figure out how to write what i’d get up and running. Also, I need more git superpowers, and the taste of it just now with heroku was promising. I’d like to have a legit github account, so I think i’ll work on that too.

And you know what? That’s fine. I’ll focus on django and git. I won’t have my project site up by wednesday. But I was going to have an amazing Wednesday anyways, and I still will.

update: the silver-lining. After shaking my head for feeling like there was nothing happening with heroku, I checked the url of the site I’m supposed to have. And there’s my Django app! (or, the startup page, saying that it’s working.) I think…well, I think I’m going to start building :)