If that all looks good at this point, we’re ready to proceed and create a virtualenv in which we’ll install Django.

Python 3 ships with pyvenv, but since it works a bit differently than virtualenv which is what I’m used to using, I decided to install virtualenv and use that. Feel free to use pyenv here if that floats your boat.

1. Use pip3 to install virtualenv:
   pip3 install virtualenv
2. Create and/or cd into the directory in which you want to put your virtualenv. I tend to put mine in ~/.virtualenvs, so I did this:
   mkdir ~/.virtualenvs
   cd ~/.virtualenvs
3. Create a virtualenv to use for our Django project (since we installed virtualenv with pip3 the default Python environment will be Python 3.5.1):
   virtualenv my_django_project
4. Activate your virtualenv:
   source my_django_project/bin/activate
5. Confirm everything looks correct at this point (this should output /path/to/virtualenv/bin/python3):
   which python3

At this point since we have Python 3.5.1 installed and have successfully created a virtualenv, we can do the usual installation of requirements using pip3, which typically will come from a requirements.txt file. For the sake of illustration we’ll go through installing Django into our virtualenv and making sure it works, but pip3 install -r requirements.txt will be the more typical way of installing all the packages you need.

1. With your virtualenv activated, install Django:
   pip3 install django
2. Verify everything is working by starting a Python interpreter:
   python3
3. Import Django to make sure it’s in your virtualenv (this shouldn’t throw any errors):
   >>> import django

Rather than the gunicorn or some of the other WSGI servers you may be familiar with, on Dreamhost you can use either Passenger or FastCGI as the application server for Django applications.

For this post I’ll be using Passenger, a tool with which I was not familiar until I saw information about it on Dreamhost. Passenger is apparently more common in Ruby on Rails setups, but it serves the same purpose and falls in the same place in the stack as any of the other WSGI tools with which you may have experience. You can read more about Dreamhost’s use of Passenger here and here.

Some Notes About Passenger

Worthy to note about using Passenger on Dreamhost is that once Passenger is enabled, all requests that come into your domain will be handed off to Passenger by Apache. Passenger will first look see if there are any files matching the request in your domain’s /public directory (and note that the files must be in the /public directory or subdirectories under /public specifically), and if it can’t find an appropriate file, Passenger then tries to handle the request itself.

To provide a couple of concrete examples, let’s assume you have a file called hello.html in your domain’s /public directory, and a request comes in for http://yourdomain.com/hello.html. Here’s what happens next:

1. Apache hands the request off to Passenger immediately. This is important to note since Apache is out of the picture entirely other than serving as a proxy to Passenger.
2. Passenger looks for a file called hello.html in your domain’s /public directory. Since it finds one, it returns that page to the requester.

1. Apache hands the request off to Passenger.
2. Passenger looks for an appropriate file in /public. This time it doesn’t find one.
3. Passenger then attempts to handle the request itself, and since later we’ll be configuring Passenger to serve up our Django application using WSGI, at this point Django would be processing the request.

Enable Passenger

In order to run a Django application on Dreamhost we’ll need to enable Passenger on the domain on which we’re going to run our Django application.

1. Log into the Dreamhost web panel
2. Click “Domains” and then click “Manage Domains”
3. Locate the domain on which you’ll be hosting your Django application and click “Edit”
4. Scroll down and under “Web Options” you’ll see a checkbox labeled “Passenger (Ruby/NodeJS/Python apps only).” Check that box.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Change Settings.”

5. Create a Django App

For the purposes of this post we’ll be creating and configuring a Django application directly on the Dreamhost server. Obviously if you have an application that’s already written that you want to run on Dreamhost you’d be uploading your application’s files as opposed to doing things from scratch on the server, but this should illustrate some of the nuances of what you need to do with your own Django application to get it running on Dreamhost with Passenger.

1. ssh into the Dreamhost server
2. Activate the virtualenv you created above:
   source ~/.virtualenvs/my_django_project/bin/activate
3. cd into the root directory of the web site on which you’ll be running your Django application. Note that this is not the aforementioned /public directory under your web site’s directory, but the root of the web site itself.
4. Start a new Django project using django-admin.py:
   python3 django-admin.py startproject my_django_project
5. Do a quick gut check by firing up the Django development server:
   cd my_django_project
   python3 manage.py runserver

6. Configure Passenger