Installing Zine on Dreamhost

Yes, until recently I was running my blog on Zine (on dreamhost).  While it was a good exercise to get it working -- and it certainly was working fine as a hosting platform, I had made up my mind that I'd like to use hosted services more.  So, even though I'm not actually hosting this on Zine, I still think this is useful information.  And so I'm reposting it.

I've just installed Zine on my Dreamhost shared host account. In a fit of existentialism, I decided to write my first blog post on how to install Zine on Dreamhost. Granted, this is pretty straightforward, and if you're willing to surf around a bit, you probably will have figured these things out yourself. But I'm all for encouraging more Zine usage (since that might give me more theme options), so I figured I'd help make this easier.

You may be wondering, "Why didn't you use Passenger?". Good question! Dreamhost does support Passenger for WSGI applications, but this uses the default system python interpreter (python 2.4, with none of the needed deps). I wanted to run this in a virtual environment and not be forced to use a kludgy os.exec() hack to use my own interpreter. And FastCGI seems to work fine and doesn't carry the "beta!" warning.

Here were the key ingredients for this recipe.

• Use Python 2.5 (not default)
• Use Virtualenv
• Use FastCGI (and Flup)

Dreamhost Setup

1. Setup the (sub)domain for your blog. Or create a new sub-directory on existing site. This will be your "blog directory" (you'll need to tell Zine where this later).
2. Setup a MySQL database for your blog.

Zine Install

Step 1: Libxml2 Prereqs

You will need to install the lxml python module, which is going to want development libs of libxml2. On Dreamhost you'll need to build your own libxml and libxslt libraries to make this all possible. This isn't as painful as it ounds. I used this blogpost as the basis for my approach. I changed those steps to use ${HOME}/usr for the --prefix flags (rather than the ~/.local in that article); I added ~/usr/bin to my PATH variable so that Python will find the xslt-config when it goes to install lxml.

Step 2: Setup Virtualenv

I chose to use virtualenv for this exercise, since 1) I'm on a shared host and 2) I typically use virtualenv anyway to isolate environments for specific applications. It makes life easier; give it a try if you haven't yet.


Now create the virtual environment somewhere. Name appropriately (we'll need the name again later).

Note: I'm using Python 2.5, which is not the default on Dreamhost (at time of writing). I found that Python 2.4 did not work. (I created a ticket.)

Activate Virtualenv

Step 3: Setup Zine

Note that all of these steps assume that you are operating with an activated virtualenv.

1. Download and unpack:
   
   
2. Install, using our Python virtual env:
   
   
3. Install Zine prereqs:
   
   
4. Install Flup:
   
   

Step 4: Setup FastCGI handler

Zine Handler

Copy the installed zine.fcgi handler into your blog web root (adjust paths accordingly):



Edit the ~/myblog-env/share/zine/servers/zine.fcgi file to ensure that the INSTANCE_FOLDER points to your blog public dir (~/blog.yoursite.com, e.g.).

.htaccess

Create an .htaccess file in your blog public directory with these contents:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^zine\.fcgi/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ zine.fcgi/$1 [L]

Final Steps

Visit your Zine URL in your browser to start the installation wizard.

When you are finished, you may wish to edit ~/blog.yoursite.com/zine.ini, to change the Zine URL to not include the zine.fcgi component of the URL (it isn't necessary, given the rewrite rules defined).

References

• Dreamhost: Python
• Dreamhost: Python FastCGI