A while back I had the pleasure of integrating a Django project with a SharePoint site on IIS. I’ll say this: It works.

Getting isapi-wsgi working with all the crazy application pool permissions, as well as other issues, was a royal pain. I also had to switch to a standalone MySQL instance instead of SQL Server because django-mssql was causing all kinds of problems.

It was also practically impossible to replicate the environment for local development. I had a trial Windows Server VM set up but would constantly run into issues in production that I hadn’t seen in development (mostly related to permissions).

So, the next time I had the pleasure of working with a Windows server, I decided to bypass IIS completely and instead use CherryPy. I should note that this was for a small internal business application.

There are several packages out there that do this, including one I made a while back for development. The problem is that they were mostly intended to run on *nix or in development and none of them handle static media (except mine, but it’s outdated and doesn’t work with contrib.staticfiles).

So I decided to steal the best parts of my previous app and just make something simple that I could run with ServiceEx.

The cool thing about CherryPy (the full thing, not just the WSGI server) is that it actually does a decent job with static files and lets you set Expires headers. It also handles virtual host names so that you can put your static files on a different subdomain.

Another perk is that, with the help of Translogger from the Paste project, you can use Python logging for requests and configure the access logs with Django.

Anyway, here is the code:

I suppose I could turn this into an app and put it on PyPi… maybe later. I would like to elaborate on the logging though.

Django 1.3 adds support for configuring standard Python logging in your “settings.py”. So what I’ve done is use that to also configure the CherryPy access logs.

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LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': True,
    'formatters': {
        'simple': {
            'format': '[%(asctime)s] %(levelname)s %(message)s',
            'datefmt': '%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S',
        },
        'verbose': {
            'format': '%(levelname)s %(asctime)s %(module)s %(process)d %(thread)d %(message)s',
            'datefmt': '%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S', # %z',
        },
    },
    'handlers': {
        'console': {
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
            'stream': 'ext://sys.stdout'
        },
        'console-simple': {
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
            'formatter': 'simple'
        },
        'console-verbose': {
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
            'formatter': 'verbose'
        },
        'access-log': {
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'class': 'logging.handlers.TimedRotatingFileHandler',
            'filename': 'access.log', # Add an appropriate directory to this.
            'when': 'midnight',
            #'backupCount': '30', #approx 1 month worth
        },
        'error-log': {
            'level': 'WARNING',
            'class': 'logging.handlers.TimedRotatingFileHandler',
            'formatter': 'verbose',
            'filename': 'error.log', # Add an appropriate directory to this.
            'when': 'midnight',
            #'backupCount': '30', #approx 1 month worth
        },
        'mail_admins': {
            'level': 'ERROR',
            'class': 'django.utils.log.AdminEmailHandler',
        },
    },
    'loggers': {
        'cherrypy.access': {
            'level':'INFO',
            'handlers':['access-log'],
        },
        'cherrypy.error': {
            'level':'INFO',
            'handlers':['error-log'],
        },
        'django': {
            'level':'INFO',
            'handlers': ['error-log', 'mail_admins'],
        },
    }
}

if 'DJANGO_DISABLE_LOGGING' in os.environ:
    LOGGING_CONFIG = None

Notice the last two lines. I ran into an issue where celeryd and celerybeat were locking the access and error log files on Windows (preventing them from rotating properly). Since Celery maintains its own logs, I needed a way to disable Django logging when being loaded from celeryd or celerybeat.

The extra handlers come in handy during development. I have a “dev_settings.py” that looks something like this:

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from settings import *


DEBUG = True
TEMPLATE_DEBUG = DEBUG

LOGGING['loggers']['cherrypy.access']['handlers'] = ['console']
LOGGING['loggers']['cherrypy.error']['handlers'] = ['console']
LOGGING['loggers']['django']['handlers'] = ['console-simple']

That way all the logs are sent to the console, just like the built-in Django runserver.

So, what is performance like? Well, I haven’t stress tested it, but it sure feels snappy. And it’s perfect for a small internal project.