We at ObjectGraph are moving to a dedicated hosting solution. The server is hosted in NY. It has Cent OS 4.4 (Based on RHEL 4). It comes installed with Python 2.3.4. A lot of packages (like yum) depend on this version of python in the system. So when i found out that some of the syntax like '@staticfunction' we were using to develop in django is not compatible with python 2.3.4, I was distraught. I decided i need to upgrade python. Here is a simple test program that fails in the older version of Python.

class Test:
        def __init__(self):
                print "Hello World!"
        def sum(self,a,b):
                return a+b

        @staticmethod
        def sum1(a,b):
                return a+b
t=Test()
print t.sum(10,10)
print t.sum1(10,10)

After a lot of struggle to find a binary package of Python 2.4.4 for Cent OS, I gave up and compiled python from source. It was pretty straightforward and i am happy with the results. This is what i did.

#wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.4.4/Python-2.4.4.tgz
#tar xvfz *.tgz
#cd Python-2.4.4
#./configure
#make
#make install

Just run python to see if it is the version 2.4.4 Now python is cleanly installed. The site-packages folder under /usr/local/lib/python2.4 are empty. So get the latest version of django and install it

#svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django
#cd django
#python setup.py install

Similary you can install MySQLdb and other libraries you want on python. Now the next steps for us is to get django running on Apache using mod_python

Labels: centos, compile, linux, python