webfaction-installers

Various custom-webapp and utility installers for WebFaction's hosting platform.

Utilities

pip - Pip Installs Packages. Installs pip for Python 2.5-2.7 and 3.1-3.3. bash <(wget -qO- https://github.com/adambrenecki/webfaction-installers/raw/master/utils/pip.sh)
supervisor - Manages processes, like daemontools or launchd, but doesn't need to run as pid 1. Use it to automatically restart your apps without waiting 20 minutes like Webfaction's default cron-based solution does. bash <(wget -qO- https://github.com/adambrenecki/webfaction-installers/raw/master/utils/supervisor.sh)

Webapps

nginx_uwsgi_python27 - Run WSGI apps on top of nginx and uwsgi. Designed to be automated with a SCM-based auto deploy process. install
- Requires: supervisor, pip
sentry - A logging app. install
- Requires: supervisor, pip
- Additional post-installation steps required - see the created file webapps/<app_name>/sentry.conf.py

Installers To Do

General redirect using extra_info (eg redirect=http://example.com/, redirect=http://example.net/my/url append-path=no)
Redirect to HTTPS

Notes on writing WebFaction webapp installers from scratch

They must begin with the following header:

  #!/usr/local/bin/python2.7
  # -----BEGIN WEBFACTION INSTALL SCRIPT-----
  #!/usr/local/bin/python2.7

This allows them to be copy-pasted or used as a remote URL.

You cannot use tabs for indentation. (This doesn't appear to be the case anymore.)
Contrary to what the official WebFaction docs say, returning any unexpected output on stdout, or any output at all on stderr, results in the script failing with a generic error message. The best way to record any information on failure is to write it to a file.

Debugging a failed webapp install

WebFaction's custom installer system provides quite possibly the least helpful error messages in the world. To get around this, these installers will create a file called install-script-error.txt in your home directory when they fail, which contains a traceback.