Deploying bottle on apache took me some time today which I hope to not repeat. Due to some of my mistakes and errors, I tripped myself up in a mess. I screwed up a new vhost entry on apache because it defaulted back to my default entry. It took me a while to realize I needed a ServerName entry in my new vhost file...

From there I copied some crazy configurations I found through google. They seemed geared towards some other distributions. At the end, I was able to slim my configuration down to several simple files that work.

Lets go over the system I am working on:

1. debian squeeze - fresh install of 6.0.5
2. apache - Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) This is the special apache setup
3. bottle - latest one from github
4. virtualenv - 1.4.9

First step is first... make sure you can get the default vhost entry operational. I know you want to skip that step, but don't skip it. Sometimes other things break. Make sure you can at least get that setup. Additionally, you should create a second vhost entry with a different ServerName.

The reason you found this article is because you have many projects you want to host on a server. You have different virtual environments for each python project with different libraries. Keeping these projects isolated is a great idea but serving them up isolated is better.

1. Let's go into the /opt directory as root and create a directory for my user jarvis:

   root@palmtree:~$ cd /opt
   root@palmtree:/opt$ mkdir jarvis
   root@palmtree:/opt$ chown -R jarvis:jarvis jarvis
   

2. Let's create the virtualenv in the /opt directory:

   jarvis@palmtree:/opt/jarvis$ virtualenv --no-site-packages test
   jarvis@palmtree:/opt/jarvis$ cd test
   jarvis@palmtree:/opt/jarvis/test$ source bin/activate
   jarvis@palmtree:/opt/jarvis/test$ mkdir src
   jarvis@palmtree:/opt/jarvis/test$ cd src
   jarvis@palmtree:/opt/jarvis/test/src$ touch test.py
   jarvis@palmtree:/opt/jarvis/test/src$ touch dispatch.wsgi
   

3. Create a test.py file for bottle to run:

   from bottle import route, run, request
   
   @route('/', method='GET')
   def index1():
       return '<h1>HELLO</h1>'
   
   @route('/hello/:name', method='GET')
   def index(name='World'):
       return '<b>Hello %s!</b>' % name
   

4. Create a dispatch.wsgi file for apache to run:

   import sys, os
   
   # ... build or import your bottle application here ...
   import bottle
   import test
   
   # Do NOT use bottle.run() with mod_wsgi
   application = bottle.default_app()
   

5. Go to your apache sites-available directory and copy the default vhost into a new entry:

   root@palmtree:~# cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
   root@palmtree:~# cp default test
   

6. Grab your favorite editor and edit the new vhost entry called test:

   <VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName test.example.net
   
   WSGIDaemonProcess ptest display-name=%{GROUP}\
    threads=4 \
    python-path=/opt/jarvis/test/src:/opt/jarvis/test/lib/python2.6/site-packages
   WSGIProcessGroup ptest
   WSGIScriptAlias / /opt/jarvis/test/src/dispatch.wsgi
   
   Alias /robots.txt /opt/jarvis/test/src/apache_static/robots.txt
   Alias /favicon.ico /opt/jarvis/test/src/apache_static/favicon.ico
   
   <Directory /opt/jarvis/test/src>
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
   </Directory>
   
   ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/test_error.log
   
   # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
   # alert, emerg.
   LogLevel warn
   
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/test_access.log combined
   </VirtualHost>
   

7. Activate the conf file, and restart Apache:

   root@palmtree:~# a2ensite test
   root@palmtree:~# services apache resart
   

The key to getting this simple configuration to work is in step 6. The line with python-path needs the path to the test.py bottle file and the site-packages directory for the virtualenv that was created. Hopefully this works for you!