Django 1.0 Template Development Book Review

Posted by Peter Baumgartner on October 15, 2009. Filed under django, review

Packt Publishing was nice enough to send us a copy of Django 1.0 Template Development by Scott Newman for review recently. I get most of my technical information via the web, so picking up a technical book was a nice change of pace. This is a well written and enjoyable read for people looking to learn a little more about Django than what is provided in the Django tutorial.

Based on the title, I expected a thorough write-up of the template system for front-end developers. With the way Django was designed, template developers need little, if any, knowledge of Python and what goes on under the hood with Django requests. I was surprised, however, to see that pure front-end (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) developers were not the target audience of this book:

This book is for web developers and template authors who want to fully understand and utilize the Django ...

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Easy Fabric Deployment, Part 2: Multiple Committers and the Dreaded Umask

Posted October 7, 2009. Filed under code, django

In part 1, we showed how we use Fabric to update and deploy Django sites to our development server with a single command. This works great when you only have one developer pushing changes to the server, but what happens when multiple committers need to update the development server?

Linux File Permissions

Typically, the default permissions for newly created files are readable by everyone and writable by the owner (644 or -rw-r--r--). These permissions are determined by the processes umask, with the default being 022. Since we want multiple committers to be able to write to files on our development server, we need to change that to 002, creating group-writable files (664 or -rw-rw-r--).

The standard way to do this is to add the line umask 002 to /etc/profile. While that works great for interactive shells, it does not get called on non-interactive shells (the kind that Fabric ...

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