Category Archives: Blog

Class-based views for Bottle

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I’m not convinced this is actually a good idea, but I have an approach for using class-based views as handlers for a route with [Bottle][bottle].

_(If you were mad keen on [Django’s][django] shift to [class-based views][cbv] you might reckon life wouldn’t be complete with a Bottle-based application until you employ classes for views. However Bottle’s use of decorators for tying URLs to views means it is less a natural fit than the same thing in Django.)_

The problem is that you can’t just decorate the method in your class using [`bottle.route`][route] because if you use that decorator on a method in a class you are telling Bottle to use the method before it has been bound to an instance of that class.

So although I wish it did, the following example will not work:

import bottle

class ViewClass(object):
@bottle.route(“/”)
def home_view(self):
return “My home page.”

obj = ViewClass()
bottle.run()

Running that will lead to errors about not enough arguments passed to the view method of your `ViewClass` instance.

Instead you need to register the route right after the object is created. This can be done in [the class’s `__new__` method][new]:

import bottle

class ViewClass(object):
def __new__(cls, *args, **kwargs):
obj = super(ViewClass, cls).__new__(cls, *args, **kwargs)
bottle.route(“/”)(obj.home_view)
return obj

def home_view(self):
return “My home page.”

obj = ViewClass()
bottle.run()

It works. It isn’t that pretty. You could achieve exactly the same thing by explicitly passing the `obj.home_view` method to `bottle.route` _after_ the instance is created. The advantage to doing this in the `__new__` method is it will happen automatically whenever `ViewClass` is instantiated.

And if you go down this path then [you should be aware of threads][threads]. Hey! Nice threads! Also I have a cold.

[bottle]: http://bottle.paws.de/
[cbv]: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/class-based-views/
[django]: http://www.djangoproject.com/
[route]: http://bottle.paws.de/docs/dev/api.html#routing
[new]: http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#object.__new__
[threads]: http://bottle.paws.de/docs/dev/tutorial.html#accessing-request-data

Mac deployment Wiki

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The [OS X Deployment and Management Wiki][wiki], articles about managing and deploying Macintoshes.

Looks like it is the work of [Rusty Myers][rusty] and Nate Walck (so far).

[wiki]: http://www.osxdeployment.info/
[rusty]: http://twitter.com/thespider

Startup times for old Macs

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Considering it is only a [PowerPC G4 processor running at 1.5 GHz][mini], I am impressed that my five-year-old little MacMini can go from pressing the on button to the login screen in 45 seconds, of which the first 10 seconds is the system trying to work out from which disk it should boot. (There is only one disk in the mini – you hear me mini? Boot from that one immediately.)

However it is another 15 seconds from login to a usable desktop, running Mac OS X 10.5.8. My [Macintosh Classic][classic] with an 8 MHz 68000 processor is slightly faster booting [System 6.0.8][608]. Both the mini and the classic can run [some version of Eudora][eudora] for e-mail. Neither machine will run Google’s Chrome browser so I reckon it is even splits on which is the more useful.

Also I don’t need an adaptor to plug in the world’s greatest [aircraft carrier masquerading as a keyboard][keyboard] on the classic. Little baby Jesus to think that Apple used to sell their considerably expensive computers with no keyboard, no screen, no graphics card, no memory, no hard disk, just a mouse! Progress means you can buy a new [MacMini][newmini] and it don’t come with a mouse neither.

[mini]: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/stats/mac_mini_g4_1.5.html
[classic]: http://apple-history.com/?model=classic
[eudora]: http://lowendmac.com/compact/68ksoftware.shtml
[608]: http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_6.0.x/
[keyboard]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Extended_Keyboard
[newmini]: http://www.apple.com/macmini/

Running Django on Mac

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These are semi-detailed steps for installing all the bits to host a [Django][django] application on [Mac OS X][macosx]. Tested on 10.5, should work perfectly on 10.6.

Use [MacPorts][macports]: relatively easy to install and the best thing is everything is contained in a directory that you can be confident won’t eff up Apple’s stuff and won’t be effed up by Apple’s stuff.

Install Xcode
————-

You need the compiler and bits that are installed with Xcode. If you can’t find your Mac install discs (Xcode is included with every new Mac but not installed) you can [download it from Apple’s developer website][xcode]. Registration is required but is free.

The current version of Xcode is easy to find, while older versions are available in the downloads section under “Developer Tools”. Xcode version 3.1.4 is the last version that will work for Mac OS X 10.5 systems.

Install MacPorts
—————-

MacPorts have a nice pkg installer. You can also build it from source.

curl -O http://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/MacPorts-1.9.1-10.5-Leopard.dmg
hdiutil attach MacPorts-1.9.1-10.5-Leopard.dmg
sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/MacPorts-1.9.1/MacPorts-1.9.1.pkg -target /
hdiutil detach /Volumes/MacPorts-1.9.1

If for some reason MacPorts cannot fetch updates you may need to [pull updates by hand][manualports].

Check your $PATH after installing ports to make sure `/opt/local/bin` is in there. If it isn’t your can do `export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:${PATH}` to fix things, and even add taht line to `~/.profile` so that bash picks it up every time (assuming you haven’t switched your shell).

Install software
—————-

The `port` command is used to manipulate the MacPorts installation. Use it to build and install the various bits we need. This takes a while, especially on old PowerPC machines. Make it more exciting by adding the `–verbose` flag. Exciting!

sudo port install python26
sudo port install apache2
sudo port install mysql5-server
sudo port install mod_python26
sudo port install py26-mysql
sudo port install py26-django
sudo port install py26-south

And if you want to hook Django into a network directory then you almost certainly want to use LDAP.

sudo port install py26-ldap

Cool kids these days say use [mod_wsgi][modwsgi] instead of [mod_python][modpython] for hosting Python applications with Apache, but I am not cool (and on 20 September 2010 I couldn’t persuade mod_wsgi to build from MacPorts on a clean installation).

Configuring and starting MySQL
——————————

*UPDATED: [commenter matea][matea] pointed to [Jason Rowland’s MySQL on Mac][jason] posting that includes steps to secure a default installation, so I’ve updated this section with the appropriate steps.*

I always seem to be the only person who cares about non-English visitors… anyway, so I want to have [MySQL][mysql] use UTF8 for everything. Edit the configuration so it does. As root, create a configuration at `/opt/local/var/db/mysql5/my.cnf` with these lines:

[mysqld]
init-connect = ‘SET NAMES utf8’
character-set-server = utf8
collation-server = utf8_general_ci
skip-networking

[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8

One thing about the line `skip-networking` in the configuration file is that it means MySQL will not listen to __any__ network clients, including connections to `127.0.0.1`. Instead clients should connect to `localhost` or they should specify the path to the socket that MySQL uses for communication. If your MySQL “client” is a Django instance running on the same host then that should not be a problem.

Now initialize the database and start the server. (The use of `-w` in the second line tells launchctl to have the database daemon start at boot. If you don’t want to have MySQL running at boot use `-F` to __force__ start just this one time instead of every time.)

sudo -u mysql /opt/local/bin/mysql_install_db5
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mysql5.plist

And let’s check that the server is up and configured right.

/opt/local/bin/mysql5 -e “SHOW variables LIKE ‘%char%'”

You should see a table showing that the character set for the client and server is set to utf8.

Now run the secure installation script for MySQL. This will ask you to set a password for MySQL’s root account (the administrator) and ask whether to remove the test database and anonymous user access (you should do both):

/opt/local/bin/mysql_secure_installation5

Thaz better.

Configuring Postgresql instead of MySQL
—————————————

If you want to use [Postgres][postgres] instead of MySQL then you need a couple different packages out of ports.

sudo port install postgresql84-server
sudo port install py26-psycopg2

Did you know Apple’s management tools use Postgres? Is true.

Configuring Apache to serve a Django project
——————————————–

Let’s suppose your Django project lives under `/Library/WebServer/example.com/myproj`, and the project’s settings file is `/Library/WebServer/example.com/myproj/settings.py`. Here’s how to configure Apache with mod_python to serve your project.

Create a separate site configuration for Apache in `/Library/WebServer/example.com/site.conf`.


SetHandler python-program
PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython
SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE myproj.settings
PythonOption django.root /
PythonDebug On
PythonPath “[‘/Library/WebServer/example.com’] + sys.path”


Order deny,allow
Allow from all

Of course once everything is hunky dory you will go back and edit the site configuration so that `PythonDebug Off`.

And finally tell Apache to use mod_python and read the site configuration. Edit `/opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf` and add a line at the end of the modules like:

LoadModule python_module modules/mod_python.so

And then a line like:

Include /Library/WebServer/example.com/site.conf

Now fire up Apache:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.apache2.plist

MacPorts has a convenient shortcut for this:

sudo port load apache2

You also want to save Apache a little grief by pre-compiling the Python source files for the project:

/opt/local/bin/python2.6 -m compileall /Library/WebServer/example.com

Hope this helps.

[manualports]: http://reliablybroken.com/b/2010/03/using-macports-behind-a-firewall/
[macosx]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/
[django]: http://www.djangoproject.com
[macports]: http://www.macports.org/
[xcode]: http://developer.apple.com/technology/xcode.html
[mysql]: http://www.mysql.com
[postgres]: http://www.postgresql.org
[modwsgi]: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/modwsgi/
[modpython]: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/modpython/
[matea]: http://reliablybroken.com/b/2010/09/running-django-on-mac/comment-page-1/#comment-1458
[jason]: http://www.jasonrowland.com/2009/10/install-mysql5-on-snow-leopard-using-macports/

Notes on using the BBC’s JSON schedule data

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The [BBC used to publish their schedules][tarball] in a great big XML tarball. They did this daily and it contained the broadcasts for the next seven days. I wrote a script that created [iCalendar][ical] files out of this for each channel.

But a couple weeks ago they [stopped][old] publishing the schedules in this format. In its place they provide [schedules for each channel or by genre or by series][new], and they also provide other formats in addition to XML.

One great advantage of the new data is that it is also available in iCalendar format, which _almost_ makes my script redundant were it not for the fact there is no weekly schedule for each channel.

[I re-wrote my script][guide] to use the newer schedule data and I got opinions!

1. Only daily schedules available for channels.

You can ask for today’s schedule, for tomorrow’s schedule, for a specific date’s schedule. You cannot ask for a week’s schedule (which is pretty much all I want) or for anything other than a day’s schedule.

However for a particular programme (but not for a channel) you can get the upcoming schedule.

2. A programme title consisting only of numbers is encoded as an integer.

I came across [a broadcast where the programme title was “606”][606] but the title appeared in the JSON data as `”title”: 606`. The value of the title should always be a string, as should other textual values.

3. Post-midnight broadcasts appear in the schedule for two days.

This is a side-effect of the fact I need to look at several consecutive days’ schedules in order to combine them into a week’s schedule. If you look at today’s schedule, programmes that are broadcast after midnight are included. If you look at tomorrow’s schedule, programmes that start immediately after midnight are included, even though they also appeared on today’s schedule.

This behaviour makes perfect sense when the schedules are consumed by a real person. If I look up today’s schedule I _want_ to see those transmissions that happen early the next morning, even though they are strictly not part of today’s schedule.

But for consuming the data programmatically, having the overlap means you have to deal with duplicate events. In my case I dealt with this by converting transmission events to tuples which are then easy to compare and you can weed out the duplicates by throwing them all [into a Python set][set].

There is a conflict between the notion of a calendar day and a transmission day. For most BBC channels the day begins and ends sometime between 1 o’clock and 5 o’clock in the morning. For some channels it isn’t obvious that one day’s programming has stopped and another has begun because there may be no dead air where nothing is transmitted, but think back to the good old days where all you got in the middle of the night was the white dot to let you know the telly was still working.

My re-written script pulls the schedule using the JSON data feeds, but I wonder if things would be easier if it just concatenated the events that are published in the daily iCalendar files? I guess we’ll never ever know.

[tarball]: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/7DayListingData?v=16wk
[ical]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar
[new]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/developers
[old]: http://www0.rdthdo.bbc.co.uk/services/api/
[606]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/programmes/schedules/2010/10/02
[guide]: http://reliablybroken.com/guide/
[set]: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#set-types-set-frozenset

Chrome’s annotated scrollbar

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Google’s [Chrome Web browser][chrome] is very interesting: it breaks quite a few Mac interface conventions (for better or worse) and adds some extra, just for you.

Macintosh scrollbars work well. You can use the Appearance panel in System Preferences to change a couple things, such as whether to put the arrows at the ends of the scrollbar or at one end together (you can use [TinkerTool][tinkertool] to access more choices if you fancy) and those choices take effect immediately in a well-behaved Mac application.

Chrome is a bit naughty in that it will use your scrollbar settings but only looks at them when it starts. If you change the arrow setting while Chrome is running it will ignore your changes until the next time it launches, whereas a *proper* Mac application picks up those settings immediately.

Naughty Chrome.

In return for not honouring your settings immediately, Chrome’s scrollbars exhibit a fantastic behaviour: overloading the scrollbars with useful information.

If you do a word search in a Chrome window, you will see orange marks in the vertical scrollbar which indicate the location of all the matching words in the document.

Nice Chrome.

In [Jenifer Tidwell][tidwell]’s book [Designing Interfaces][di] she calls this design pattern the [“annotated scrollbar”][as].

[tinkertool]: http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html
[chrome]: http://www.google.com/chrome
[tidwell]: http://jtidwell.net/
[di]: http://designinginterfaces.com/
[as]: http://quince.infragistics.com/Patterns/Annotated%20Scrollbar.aspx

How to manage more than one Mac

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This is an overview of what tools there are for managing a bunch of Macintosh computers on a network. It is intended as a starting point for someone wondering what on earth to do with all those pretty-looking computers the hippie designers like so much.

Basic environment
—————–

You must remove admin access for users, otherwise you cannot be certain where the user data is, and if you cannot isolate the user’s data then you cannot trust that updating the system won’t delete their stuff.

You really need to have the Macs bound to a directory and have account info stored in the directory. This means you don’t need to create and maintain local accounts on each Mac. It is also makes life much simpler when you need to migrate data from one Mac to another because the account uid/gid will be persistent.

Mac OS X Server
—————

The server version of Mac OS X includes a [software update server][sus]. By hosting your own local copy of the Apple software update server you conserve network bandwidth and you get to withhold what updates are presented to the Mac clients should you want to.

You also get to use Apple’s directory service and to control policy with MCX.

You don’t necessarily need OS X Server, but it is very useful.

[sus]: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4069

Reporting and management suites
——————————-

From there you have a bunch of approaches. Big environments (educational) use things like [Radmind][1] and [Puppet][2] to enforce software load-sets across hundreds, thousands of Macs.

For small network sizes people use [Apple Remote Desktop][3] (ARD) and/or [Casper][4]. ARD is extremely useful whatever you decide to use because the administration software includes remote desktop stuff so the help desk monkey can take over the user’s screen, fix the problem and put the telephone back down.

Although these tools handle reporting, remote installations, running scripts, batch configuration, etc. you still need to spend a lot of time building installation packages. You need a base system image that can be quickly deployed to a Mac, and you need additional images or installation packages containing the various software that goes on top.

[1]: http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/
[2]: http://www.puppetlabs.com/
[3]: http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/
[4]: http://www.jamfsoftware.com/products/casper-suite

Deploying system software and applications
——————————————

To build system restore images use [InstaDMG][5]. Much better than everything else.

What you want for deploying software is some form of un-attended network push. This means the software installation has to work with access via SSH, whether the user is logged in or not and needs to succeed when installed as root.

With luck your software vendor already uses well-behaved package format installers (i.e. Microsoft most of the time). Or the software is a self-contained app so it can be installed and updated by copying it to /Applications (maybe you go to the trouble of making a pkg for it first).

But flipping heck Adobe hates Mac administrators. The Adobe Creative Suite installers (including those on volume license media) are absolutely useless. The updaters are even worse. [Adobe provides a volume deployment kit][6] which is bafflingly obtuse and which doesn’t actually work for the admin’s most important installation scenario.

Casper and [LANRev][7] include tools for building pkg installers from the Adobe media. Adobe’s enterprise kit supposedly does the same thing. The other thing you do is build your own pkg from what gets installed. That isn’t too painful, but having to build your own update pkgs for the numerous Adobe updates is painful.

(The [Apple Installer-Dev list][8] is full of developers trying to work around bugs in PackageMaker that crop up as soon as you want to do anything other than copy files to disk. Many admins prefer [Iceberg][9] or [Packages][packages] and other software for building installer packages.)

[5]: http://code.google.com/p/instadmg/
[6]: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/creativesuite/enterprisedeployment.html
[7]: http://www.lanrev.com/
[8]: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/installer-dev
[9]: http://s.sudre.free.fr/Packaging.html
[packages]: http://s.sudre.free.fr/Software/Packages/about.html

System configuration and user preferences
—————————————-

To some degree you configure the system as part of building the base image. Things like have the Mac automatically configure the network, bind to a domain, set power-saving mode, disable auto-login, etc. should all be part of a first-run script that happens when a new Mac is switched on.

In general you should avoid changing the default settings for everything else, either per-Mac or per-user. Saves you much hassle.

Most software these days uses plist format and reads the settings from the correct places (even recent versions of Office are good at this). Adobe of course doesn’t, but I have infinite patience. Assuming all the prefs you need to manage are in plist format, you either just run scripts to set things on an ad-hoc basis or you enforce policy with login hooks. If you use [Open Directory to manage Macs][10] you can use the Mac OS X Server tools to push settings to all users. Since 10.5 you can [use each Mac’s local directory in much the same way as Open Directory to manage settings too][11] (although you need to then handle updating each Mac yourself).

You can use [login/logout hooks][12] which run for each user. You usually find if you run a system-wide script to adjust per-user settings that at some point you mess up the permissions, no matter how careful your script is. The other approach is to use [per-user launchd scripts][13], although they were effectively broken in 10.4 and not much better in 10.5. The [launchd man pages][launchd] are required reading even so.

[10]: http://images.apple.com/server/macosx/docs/User_Management_v10.6.pdf
[11]: http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=using-mcx-in-the-dslocal-domain
[12]: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2420
[13]: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Articles/LaunchOnDemandDaemons.html
[launchd]: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man5/launchd.plist.5.html

Interesting bits
—————-

– Mac OS X Server docs: [http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/resources/documentation.html](http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/resources/documentation.html)
– Macos-x-server mailing list: [http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/macos-x-server](http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/macos-x-server)
– Munki, for deploying software: [http://code.google.com/p/munki/](http://code.google.com/p/munki/)
– DeployStudio, like Casper: [http://www.deploystudio.com/Home.html](http://www.deploystudio.com/Home.html)
– AFP548, fantastic tips: [http://www.afp548.com/](http://www.afp548.com/)
– Mike Bombich, admin: [http://www.bombich.com/](http://www.bombich.com/)
– Greg Neagle, admin: [http://managingosx.wordpress.com/](http://managingosx.wordpress.com/)
– Preston Holmes, admin: [http://ptone.com/dablog/](http://ptone.com/dablog/)
– MacEnterprise mailing list: [http://www.macenterprise.org/mailing-list](http://www.macenterprise.org/mailing-list)
– MacManagers mailing list: [http://www.mac-mgrs.org/](http://www.mac-mgrs.org/)
– Adobe installer blog: [http://blogs.adobe.com/oobe/](http://blogs.adobe.com/oobe/)

Bottle’s view decorator and default variables

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[Bottle][bottle]’s [`@view` decorator][view] provides a simple way to designate a template to render an HTML page. Your view function just has to return a dictionary, and its contents can be accessed from the template using the `'{{ name }}’` syntax.

The `@view` decorator can also take keyword arguments. These are treated as default template variables – if the dictionary returned by your view function doesn’t have a key for one of the keyword arguments then the template will use the value passed into the decorator, like so:

from bottle import view

@view(‘default.html’, author=’David Buxton’)
def home():
return {‘title’: ‘Home page’}

That would render any instance of `'{{ author }}’` as `’David Buxton’`. And then you can have another view function that overrides the keywords by returning a different value in the dictionary:

from bottle import view

@view(‘default.html’, author=’David Buxton’)
def music():
return {‘title’: ‘Thalassocracy’, ‘author’: ‘Frank Black’}

And at that point I wonder what is the advantage of using keyword arguments with `@view`: you have to decorate each function separately, and if you want to override a keyword in your return dictionary then it would be easier not to specify the keyword in the first place.

Thus the real point of using keywords with the `@view` function is only apparent if you curry the `@view` decorator with keywords first so that you can re-use the curried decorator and avoid repeating yourself.

*Someday I will re-write the previous sentence. Until then, sorry.*

Instead of passing a default author each time as in the examples above, let’s make a new `@view` decorator (using Python’s [functools module][functools]) and then use that on each view function:

import functools
from bottle import view

view = functools.partial(view, author=’David Buxton’)

@view(‘default.html’)
def home():
return {‘title’: ‘Home page’}

@view(‘default.html’)
def music():
return {‘title’: ‘Thalassocracy’, ‘author’: ‘Frank Black’}

The new decorator means you get the default keyword arguments wherever you use `@view` while permitting any function to override those defaults in the dictionary it returns.

And if you wanted to get really lazy you could even pass in a template name when wrapping the decorator with `functools.partial`, however you would not be able to use your wrapped decorator to change the template name because it is a positional argument (like what [it explains here in the functools documentation][partial]). You would also have to call the decorator with no arguments like `’@defaultview()’`. So forget I mentioned it.

I’m not saying you are lazy.

[bottle]: http://bottle.paws.de/
[functools]: http://docs.python.org/library/functools.html
[partial]: http://docs.python.org/library/functools.html#functools.partial
[view]: http://bottle.paws.de/docs/0.8/api.html#bottle.view

Anita said yes!

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I have been poking at [Adobe][adobe]’s support pages recently. They have RSS feeds to which you can subscribe in order to learn when [new support documents have been published][rss]. Today I happened to refresh the feed in those moments before someone bothered to proof-read what they were publishing.

> Please do not publish this doc without checking with Anita. I’m in the process of reviewing and editing it. Thanks. AnitaWhat’s coveredIntroduction to the GPUGPU features in Photoshop and Adobe Bridge…

Here’s how it looked in [NetNewsWire][nnw]:

Screenshot of NetNewsWire

Those run-together words in the feed are a fair example of the lack of attention to detail in the design of [the Adobe support site][support]. There’s good stuff on there, but finding it is frustrating and anyway wouldn’t you rather download a demo of something with [motherfucking Akamai download manager][akamai]?

Meanwhile Anita must have said to go ahead because [there’s no mention of her on that article’s page now][kb].

[adobe]: http://www.adobe.com/
[nnw]: http://netnewswireapp.com/
[support]: http://www.adobe.com/support/
[rss]: http://www.adobe.com/support/rss/
[akamai]: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402065.html
[kb]: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404898.html

Django-style routing for Bottle

3 Replies

[Bottle][bottle] provides the [`@route` decorator][route] to associate URL paths with view functions. This is very convenient, but if you are a [Django][django]-reject like me then you may prefer having all your URLs defined in one place, the advantage being it is easy to see at a glance [all the different URLs your application will match][urlconf].

*Updated: I have re-written this post and the example to make it simpler following Marcel Hellkamp’s comments (Marcel is the primary author of Bottle). My original example was needlessly complicated.*

It is possible to have [a Django-style urlpatterns stanza][urlpatterns] with a Bottle app. Here’s how it can work:

from bottle import route

# Assuming your *_page view functions are defined above somewhere
urlpatterns = (
# (path, func, name)
(‘/’, home_page, ‘home’),
(‘/about’, about_page, ‘about’),
(‘/contact’, contact_page, ‘contact’),
)

for path, func, name in urlpatterns:
route(path, name=name)(func)

Here we run through a list where each item is a triple of URL path, view function and a name for the route. For each we simply call the `route` method and then invoke it with the function object. Not as flexible as using the decorator on a function (because the `@route` decorator can take additional keyword arguments) but at least you can have all the routes in one place at the end of the module.

Then again if you have so many routes that you need to keep them in a pretty list you probably aren’t writing the simple application that Bottle was intended for.

(This was tested with Bottle’s 0.8 and 0.9-dev branches.)

[bottle]: http://bottle.paws.de/
[route]: http://bottle.paws.de/docs/0.8/api.html#bottle.route
[django]: http://www.djangoproject.com/
[urlconf]: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/topics/http/urls/#example
[urlpatterns]: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/