Re: Running django-admin.py Commands without a Shell

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 4:08 AM, maxweld <david@maxwell.uk.net> wrote:
> I am working with my virtual hosting provider to enable him support
> Django. I have used him for ages, and having converted myself to
> Django would like to help establish another hosting provider with
> support for Django.
>
> I have a configuration for his servers and virtual hosting environment
> that works well, enabling the application to be developed on a
> development server using Django's 'runserver', and then transferred to
> the virtual hosting environment where the production service would
> run.
>
> I now need to work out how best to execute the various commands
> provided by django-admin.py. The hosted environment provides no shell
> access, only FTP to copy files to the site and phpMyAdmin to manage
> the database tables. This is basically a security feature.

There is a way to do this, but for some reason it doesn't appear to be
documented (which is itself a bug that should be logged).

However, the technique is mentioned in passing in the 1.0 porting guide:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.0-porting-guide/#running-management-commands-from-your-code

Ignore the old-style syntax, and just look at new-style
management.call_command syntax. That allows you to call any management
command you want, with whatever command-line arguments you want.

> I would like to be able to execute django-admin.py through a web
> interface, ideally capturing the output and displaying it back to the
> user. Has this ever been tried before? Does anybody know of a package
> doing this? Am I crazy?

The output capture is the only difficult part; historically, admin
commands have directly written out stdout.

You can work around this with some monkeypatching of sys.stdout/stderr
-- it's not pretty, but it does work.

The good news is that in trunk, we've started to rectify this. We've
added self.stdout and self.stderr to management commands; these act as
mirrors of sys.stdout and sys.stderr by default, but you can
programatically set them to be any other stream you want. See

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/custom-management-commands/

for usage, and the fixtures modeltest for an example of usage (and,
for that matter, of an example of usage of call_command).

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)

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