In the last couple of years I’ve been working on various projects that – unfortunately – still use Subversion as their version control system. I moved to git already a few years ago and I wanted to keep using it as much as possible. Luckily git-svn is an incredibly complete tool to interact with a Subversion repository without leaving the comfort of the git power toolset. But there are gotchas.

This post assumes you are already a little bit aquainted with git-svn and you know how to interact with a subversion repository using it. In case you are not or you want a refresher, please have a look at this post from Bart or google it.

The list below is a list of all the tips I had to research and integrate in my workflow to keep using git joyfully in conjunction with Subversion. Enjoy!

Setting up the files to ignore

You should make sure that git ignores the same files svn does. The simpler trick is to append the list of svn:ignore files to the default git exclude file:

git svn show-ignore >> .git/info/exclude

An alternative method is the magical update-index  –assume-unchanged:

git update-index --assume-unchanged files to ignore

This is quite a fine trick I’ve consistently used in the past year. If you need more information, have a look at this post on Stackoverflow.

If you use the latter method, how do you find out later that a file has been ignored in git? You can use this:

git ls-files -v | grep ^[a-z] | sed -e 's/^h\ //'

git svn clone -s -r604:HEAD http://nick@svn.xxxxxx.com/repos/ -T trunk -b branches -t tags

git st | grep .svn | awk {'print $3'} | xargs git rm --cached

First of course we need to install nginx, pretty easy with Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install nginx

Create a new file called <appname> in /etc/nginx/sites-available/ like the following:

upstream djangoserv {
    server 127.0.0.1:8801;
}

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name  alkemic;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/appname.access.log;

    location ^~ /site_media/  {
       alias /home/nick/dev/projects/pinax07/appname/site_media/;
       autoindex on;
    }
    location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc \
        |xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js|mov)   {
        #access_log   off;
        expires      30d;
    }

    location / {
        # host and port to fastcgi server
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8801;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
        fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
        fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name;
        fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port;
        fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol;
        fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
        fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
        fastcgi_pass_header Authorization;
        fastcgi_intercept_errors off;
    }
}

Link it to sites-enabled so that we know it’s going to be started up (meanwhile you want to remove the default one):

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/appname /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Startup nginx with:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start

Activate your pinax installation (change the path to where you have installed your Pinax virtual environment):

source /home/nick/dev/projects/pinax07/bin/activate

Install flup (required to have manage.py run as fastcgi) in your virtual env:

pip install flup

Symlink all the static assets into the site_media folder:

css -> /home/nick/dev/projects/pinax07/appname/media/css/
img -> /home/nick/dev/projects/pinax07/appname/media/img
js -> /home/nick/dev/projects/pinax07/appname/media/js
pinax -> ../../lib/python2.6/site-packages/pinax/media/default/pinax/
snd -> /home/nick/dev/projects/pinax07/appname/media/snd
swf -> /home/nick/dev/projects/pinax07/appname/media/swf

Launch the python fastcgi process:

 python ./manage.py runfcgi method=threaded host=127.0.0.1 port=8801

Or:

python ./manage.py runfcgi method=prefork host=127.0.0.1 port=8801

Note that you might need to move your development environment to use a proper db like MySQL because otherwise the app will have problems finding your sqlite db file.

You should have now your app running on the blazing fast nginx.

In the image above I am immersed into integrating Compass into Pinax (full post on that will follow).

When developing under Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 at the moment) I have settled for a long time now on the ultra-productive tiling window manager Xmonad. Nothing I tried beats it. My fingers and my brain now are one with the keyboard short-cuts and the concept of mouse-less zen.

Yes I use vim extensively and yes I use screen with the new ubuntu screen-profiles. It rocks.

What I would like to build (or find if it already exists) is a custom CD that when inserted into a Windows or Mac OSX box does the following:

• Start a virtualbox/vmware instance with my Linux distribution of choice.
• Inside the virtual machine the web app is started automatically in debug mode.
• Proper networking is in place so that the web app is accessible to the host operating system on a specified port.
• The template/media folder of my web app is shared via SMB with the host OS.

This way the graphic designer could work on the templates/design of the application having (almost) zero knowledge of the technology behind and no access to the code.

I have already developed a solution like this for myself using colinux. But the process required quite some fiddling and was all but automatic.

Automated is the keyword.

That’s it.


sending message 'Confirm email address for example.com' to email1@test1.com
sending message 'Confirm email address for example.com' to email2@test2.com
[...]
sending message 'Confirm email address for example.com' to email3@test3.com


Unix command line tools can make the job of extracting those emails and make them ready to be used in a To (or BCC) field a one liner:

cat wrong.txt | awk {'print $9'} | uniq | xargs -I{} echo -n "{},"

The result is:

email1@test1.com, email2@test2.com, [...], email3@test3.com