Hi, I'm Chris

This blog is about programming, linux and other stuff. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions for improvements! contact

How to deploy a python3 wsgi application with apache2 and debian

Deploying an flask application written in python3 on debian wheezy with apache and mod_wsgi is not as easy as I thought. There are some not so obvious obstacles to overcome:

To run a python3 app, you need mod_wsgi for python3. Unfortunately, the version of libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3 only works with python < 3.3 and flask needs python > 3.2! Therefore, you have to build a recent version of mod_wsgi from source. This can be done easily by installing mod_wsgi via pip after building installing a recent version of python3:

# wget the latest version of python3 from
# https://www.python.org/downloads/source/
tar xzvf Python-3.4.2.tgz
cd Python-3.4.2
./configure --enable-shared
make -j #-j is for faster compilation
make install

Try to start python3, if you get an error messages complaining about libpython3, create a symbolic link like this: ln -s /usr/local/lib/libpython3.4m.so.1.0 /lib/libpython3.4m.so.1.0

Now we can install mod_wsgi via pip:

pip3 install mod_wsgi

Finally we need to create another symlink in order to get mod_wsgi working with apache2:

ln -s /usr/local/lib/python3.4/site-packages/mod_wsgi/server/mod_wsgi-py34.cpython-34m.so /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_wsgi.so

# load mod_wsgi and restart apache
a2enmod wsgi
service apache2 restart

Good job! We have installed a recent version of python and mod_wsgi that allows us to run flask applications on our server. But there is a little bit of work left to do. With a python version < 3, the common way to activate a virtual environment within a wsgi file looks as follows:

#app.wsgi
...
activate_this = os.path.join(PROJECT_DIR, 'bin', 'activate_this.py')
execfile(activate_this, dict(__file__=activate_this))
...

But since python3 there is neither execfile nor activate_this.py. How can this be done in python3?

My workaround for this problem is to place a new activate_this.py file in the bin directory of the virtual environment (thanks to this SO post) and replace the execfile with exec and open:

#app.wsgi
...
exec(open(activate_this).read())
...

With the above adjustments you should be able to deploy your application! If you find any errors or have any other suggestions please leave a comment!