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Introduction

Stephane is a tiny shim that makes it trivially easy to serve Django apps with Aspen.

Installation

$ mkdir ~/www.example.com
$ cd ~/www.example.com
$ django-admin.py startproject <foo>
$ svn export http://aspen-commons.googlecode.com/svn/stephane/trunk/__

~/www.example.com will be on Django's PYTHONPATH, so you can include any third-party modules right next to your project package. Here's what your filesystem will look like:

~/www.example.com/             <= website root; added to PYTHONPATH
~/www.example.com/__/          <= Stephane (an Aspen "magic directory")
~/www.example.com/<foo>/       <= your Django project
~/www.example.com/geopy/       <= any other modules you need
~/www.example.com/README.aspen <= automatically added by Aspen

Usage

Now install Aspen, and:

$ cd ~/www.example.com
$ export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=<foo>.settings
$ aspen
launching child process
starting child server
aspen starting on ('0.0.0.0', 8080)

Congratulations! Aspen is running in development mode, and will restart whenever your project files change.

Details

Stephane is trivial: 19 lines in 3 files. It is an Aspen magic directory pre-configured for Django. It includes a module called grappelli that adds the Aspen website root to PYTHONPATH, and configures Django using the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable. It then tells Aspen to use Django's WSGI handler to serve all requests for this website.

If DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is unset, then it defaults to the value of settings_module in the [django] section of __/etc/aspen.conf.

Please see the Stephane source and the Aspen documentation for a detailed understanding of how Stephane works.

Stephane Grappelli was Django Reinhardt's long-time sideman and violin player.