Playing with django… or trying to

This weekend, I am a “bachelorette.”  That is, the BF is out of town on his male-bonding ski weekend, so I’m here by myself.  After treating myself to a dinner of brussels sprouts, Annie’s gluten free mac and cheese, and far too much chocolate, I got re-started on a project I began over the holidays.  That project is building a little web site (locally, i.e. on my own computer, at this time).

Over the holidays, I messed around with Django, a python framework building websites that advertises itself as being “The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines,” and I want to try it again.  Unlike some other frameworks, there is the option to use any one of several different back ends (databases) with Django.  I used sqlite3 in my earlier experiments, but decided to switch to MySQL for todays experiments because I’m more familiar with it.

This, of course, is where the trouble started.  MySQL wasn’t installed on my MacBook Air.  Or at least not in the right place.  And I needed to do a bunch of things to get it.

I needed to download and install homebrew.  It turns out that I did this a while back for a RailsBridge workshop that was aimed at teaching Rails web development.  The workshop was fun enough, but my installation of homebrew was lacking.  I needed to download Xcode, and then its command line interface.  And then homebrew just wouldn’t work!  I got errors like this one:

Warning: /usr/bin occurs before /usr/local/bin 
This means that system-provided programs will be used instead of those provided by Homebrew. The following tools exist at both paths:
...
Consider amending your PATH so that /usr/local/bin is ahead of /usr/bin in your PATH.

After some Googling around (StackOverflow is the greatest thing ever), I learned what to do and set about changing my etc/path file. Which, of course, was totally goofed from the settings for the RailsBridge/ trying to get git to function on my Air after that. This issue fixed, it was time for the next one. And the next one. And the next one… for example:

Marguerites-MacBook-Air:local megdesko$ mysqld
130125 18:51:54 [Warning] Can't create test file /usr/local/var/mysql/Marguerites-MacBook-Air.lower-test

I’m currently struggling to get mysql server to start (finally got it installed correctly!) on my computer. It’s been a little frustrating (change permissions, run some scripts, they seem to work, but the next one fails), so I will re-group and try again tomorrow.

I had grand plans for a little hackathon this weekend, but am not sure if that is going to happen. Either way, I still am learning a lot.

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