Configuring Apache 2 in Ubuntu for WSGI Python

There’s a great thread on the Ubuntu forums regarding this topic. For the purpose of keeping a record of what I needed to do:

1. Install Apache 2
2. Install libapache2-mod-wsgi
   
# apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi

3. Link the project directory to /var/www
   
# cd /var/www
# ln -s /some/path/DevTools

4. Update /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
   
    <Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
        AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
        AddHandler wsgi-script .wsgi
    </Directory>

5. Restart Apache
   
# apache2ctl restart

6. Create the tester script, /var/www/DevTools/tester.wsgi
   
def application(environ, start_response):
    status = "200 OK"
    output = "Hello World!"
 
    response_headers = [('Content-type', 'text/plain'),
                ('Content-Length', str(len(output)))]
    start_response(status, response_headers)
 
    return [output]

7. Verify your tester by going to http://localhost/DevTools/tester.wsgi. The output should be:
   
Hello World!


If you get any 500 Server Error responses, check /var/log/apache2/error.log first. mod_python does a better job with error reporting than WSGI but is, in my experience, a more fragile framework for configuring and developing web apps.