Recently, I worked on updating one of our Django projects. It hadn’t been touched for a while, and Django needed to be updated to a current version. I also added some automated tests, switched from mod_wsgi to Phusion Passenger, and moved the source code from subversion to git.
Django Update
The Django update didn’t end up being too involved. The project was running Django 1.6.x, and I updated it to the Django LTS 1.8.x. Django migrations were added in Django 1.7, and as part of the update I added an initial migration for the app. In my test script, I needed to add a django.setup() for the new Django version, but otherwise, there weren’t any code changes required.
Automated Tests
This project didn’t have any automated tests. I added a few tests that exercised the basic functionality of the project by hitting different URLs with the Django test client. These tests were not comprehensive, but they did run a signification portion of the code.
mod_wsgi => Phusion Passenger
We used to use mod_wsgi for serving our Python code, but now we use Phusion Passenger. Passenger lets us easily run Ruby and Python code on the same server, and different versions of Python if we want (eg. Python 2.7 and Python 3). (The mod_wsgi site has details of when it can and can’t run different versions of Python.)
Subversion => Git
Here at the Brown University Library, we used to store our source code in subversion. Now we put our code in Git, either on Bitbucket or Github, so one of my changes was to move this project’s code from subversion to git.
Hopefully these changes will make it easier to work with the code and maintain it in the future.