I’ve been checking out python on and off for a while. It’s one of those languages I’ve been meaning to learn. I hear it’s great for desktop development as well as web development.

To setup Apache 2 on Ubuntu to run python scripts like PHP, CF, ASP, et al, you can do the following (this information came from a couple places mostly here and here it’s assumed you are already running apache2):

Most of this will require root so you’ll want to just switch now:

rob@server:~$ sudo bash

now grab python if it’s not there already:

root@server:~# apt-get install python

Grab the mod_python apache2 mod (the plugin to connect apache to python):

root@server:~# apt-get install libapache2-mod-python

After the mod_python is there, make a sim link to the available mods

root@server:~# cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
root@server:~# ln -s ../mods-available/mod_python.load mod_python.load

After the link is made, you can either add the ability to run python to the whole server or to a specified directory. If you want to do global:

root@server:~# cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
root@server:~# vi default

And add the following lines:

...
<Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride AuthConfig
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all

        #add these 3
        AddHandler mod_python .py
        PythonHandler mod_python.publisher
        PythonDebug On
        #/add these 3

        # Uncomment this directive is you want to see apache2's
        # default start page (in /apache2-default) when you go to /
        #RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
</Directory>
...

If you are like me though, and just want to play with python, you can add it to an alias directory. Make a directory in your home directory and add to the alias file:

root@server:~# vi /etc/apache2/conf.d/alias

And add (replacing the paths with your own):

Alias /python "/home/rob/python"
<Directory "/home/rob/python">
  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride All
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
  AddHandler mod_python .py
  PythonHandler mod_python.publisher
  PythonDebug On
</Directory>

Once you’ve added either the global setting or the alias setting, restart apache:

root@server:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And finally, add a test page to make sure all went well (save with a .py extension):

def index(req):<br></br>
   req.write("Hello World!")

Careful with typing that, tabs vs. spaces matter in python (the one thing so far I find I dislike about the language).