Google Apps List Shared Contacts
I’ll be the first to call out Google that their gdata python library for connecting into the Google Apps API is the worst.
I wanted to grab all the shared contacts from our domain and it was a giant in the ass. Here is the code I ended up with
import gdata.contacts.client
contact_list = gdata.contacts.client.ContactsClient()
contact_list.client_login(email="user@domain.com",
password="password",
source='comany-app-1',
account_type='HOSTED')
feed_url = contact_list.GetFeedUri(contact_list="domain.com", projection='full')
while True:
feed = contact_list.get_feed(
uri=feed_url,
auth_token=None,
desired_class=gdata.contacts.data.ContactsFeed)
for entry in feed.entry:
print entry.title.text
next_link = feed.GetNextLink()
if next_link is None:
break
feed_url = next_link.href
The email you use needs to have admin rights over your domain in Google Apps.
Django: Custom Decorator with an Argument
Sometimes you want to be able to create a decorator for functions in Django but have the ability to pass in an argument into the decorator. I came across this when I wanted to switch from the require_login decorator to check if a user was in a certain group to see the function.
So the first thing I did was create a new directory in my project root called decorators and put a blank __init__.py file there. My I cated an auth.py file with the following contents.
from functools import wraps
from django.contrib.auth.models import Group
from django.http import Http404
def group_required(groups=[]):
def decorator(func):
def inner_decorator(request,*args, **kwargs):
for group in groups:
try:
if Group.objects.get(name=group) in request.user.groups.all():
return func(request, *args, **kwargs)
except:
pass
raise Http404()
return wraps(func)(inner_decorator)
return decorator
So we can use it like this in our project
from decorators.auth import group_required
@group_required(["admins"])
def show_index(request):
....
I decided to make it a list being passed in. The main reason was to make it was to pass in multiple groups that you might want to allow to be allowed in.
My version doesn’t do much error checking.. if you want a more updated version of this function checkout my githib project I’ve started to put all my custom decorators up and online
What Rollout will be?
I have been debating just helping with fabric or writing my own app for a week now and I just think what I need and want fabric just isn’t and too much work to get it to the way I want it to be.
So here are some of the things I want Rollout to be.
- Be able to run in console
- Be able to tie the Rollout API into your own python webapp
- Rollout output should be multiformat (xml/json)
- Should be threaded
- Should have a run_first() and run_last() method
- Tie in git/svn?
Again if you want to watch the project it is http://github.com/mzupan/rollout
Reason #2 on why Django is great
The decorators that Django has are a great time saver. There are a lot of methods in your views where you only want logged in users to see. So you can use a decorator before the function to check if they are logged in or not.
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
@login_required
def my_view(request):
....
So learn to use these time savers in your project.
Nginx proxy timeout fix
This is something that is an easy fix. Nginx is a great web server not only for your primary site but for a proxy as well since it is made to serve a lot of requests very fast.
So it is as simple as this
location / {
proxy_pass https://staging;
proxy_read_timeout 500;
proxy_next_upstream error;
break;
}
The key lines are proxy_read_timeout and proxy_next_upstream.
Rollout has been designed
I’m a big fan of fabric, a python module to make deployments easy. It is still very new but has some great features and some major short comings I don’t think the authors thought of before they designed it.
The major shortcoming is a lack of parallel deployments. Fabric works great on 1 or 2 hosts you need to deploy on but when you have more then that for a large application it is painful. There is a patch for parallel deployments and it works but it “breaks” some features of fabric. The main one is the @runs_once.
So I am going to try to build a python module to better handle deployments in a parallel fashion. I have decided to model my module after fabric since I’m very use to it and I think their model works.
I started a GitHub project for it but don’t have any code in there yet.
http://github.com/mzupan/rollout
If you are interested please keep an eye on the project. I hope to make it functional soon.
Remote Editing with Eclipse
I was doing some Django work trying to get PayPal WPP to work with my application and it was stuck behind your basic LinkSys wifi router. Now you can just go in and forward the ports, edit PalPal configs and bla bla bla.
That is no fun. So I found a nice little plugin for eclipse that handles remote editing over SFTP. So now I can do all my remote testing/development via SFTP and not have to make all these changes.
So do the following, open up your install manager.
Help -> Install New Software
Add the following URL to the box with Work with
http://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/updates/
Now select the following item
RSE_Runtime
It might prompt you to install a few dependencies, just install them. It will prompt you to restart eclipse also.
Once it is restarted we need to create a connection
Window -> Open Perspective -> Other
Then select
Remote System Explorer
Then you will see a Remote Systems tab that has appeared and you can right click in that tab and create a new connection. Then you are good to edit remotely.
Reason #1 on why Django is great
All the crazy helper function they have for models to display information in templates. Say I have a model that looks like this with a choice field (it will get rendered as a select input in html.
SEX_CHOICE = (
(1, 'Male'),
(2, 'Female'),
)
class Animal(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
sex = models.SmallIntegerField(max_length=1, default=0, choices=SEX_CHOICE)Now in my template I can do the following to see if an animal object is a Male or a Female
{{animal.get_sex_display}}
There is no need to create a method for that in the model. Django does it for you. Saving you time and effort.
Install fabric on Redhat/CentOS 5
Fabric is a great tool for helping deploy applications. It is written in Python and still in it’s early stages. The big issue is that fabric will not run on python v2.4. That is a problem since Redhat/CentOS v5 ships with v2.4 so we have to make it work.
So the first thing to do is install python 2.5. I found great rpms here. I am going to mirror the RPMS on my blog just in case. You also need to install tkinter25 which I provide for you also. These are only for 64bit. You can do some googling to find the 32 bit versions I am sure. You also need to install libtk and libTix.
Install some dependancies
yum install tk tix
Now lets install python and tkinter
mkdir python
cd python
wget http://zcentric.com/files/python25-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
wget http://zcentric.com/files/python25-devel-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
wget http://zcentric.com/files/python25-libs-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
wget http://zcentric.com/files/python25-test-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
wget http://zcentric.com/files/python25-tools-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
wget http://zcentric.com/files/tkinter25-2.5.1-bashton1.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh *.rpm
Remove all the python25 rpms
rm -rf *.rpm
Now you have v2.4 and v2.5 installed. Now lets download the needed fabric dependancies and fabric. I built these to run for python25
wget http://zcentric.com/files/fabric-0.9-0.1.b1.noarch.rpmwget http://zcentric.com/files/python25-setuptools-0.6c5-2.noarch.rpmwget http://zcentric.com/files/python25-paramiko-1.7.6-1.noarch.rpmwget http://zcentric.com/files/python25-crypto-2.0-1.rf.x86_64.rpmrpm -ivh *.rpm
vi /usr/bin/fab
#!/usr/bin/python
#!/usr/bin/python25
[root@dev1 ~]# fabFatal error: Couldn’t find any fabfiles!Aborting.
Bash: Get largest files in a directory
So you have a partition with a ton of subdirectories and the partition is almost full and you want to see if there are large files eating up space. There is an easy command you can run to list the 10 biggest files
find /directory -printf ‘%s %p\n’ | sort -nr | head -n 10
You can change the head -n 10 to -n 20 if you want to get the 20 biggest files.
