Bulk Upgrading Django Sites

A new version of Django was released a couple of days ago. I’m currently at 11 sites using Django, so upgrading them all manually (which I did last time) is a pain.

To help me out, I wrote a tiny Fabric script to spin through my sites, check if they’re using the version of Django that was upgraded, and if they are, upgrade them.

Simple Sites

It’s worth noting that this only works because all of my sites are fairly low traffic, and I don’t mind too much just taking them offline for a minute or two. Also, they’re all hosted on Webfaction, and have very similar setups1.

The code

We’ll start off by looking at the actual command I run, upgrade_django, which I run across all my Webfaction accounts2.

def upgrade_django(from_version, to_version):
    apps = django_apps[env.host_string]
    for app in apps:
        version = get_django_version(app)
        if version == from_version:
            print ("Current version of Django for %s "
                   "is %s, upgrading to %s..."
                   % (app, version, to_version))
            upgrade_django_install(app, to_version)
        else:
            print ("Current version of Django for %s "
                   "is %s, no upgrade needed."
                   % (app, version))

To upgrade all Django 1.5 sites I have to 1.5.1, I run upgrade_django like this:

fab upgrade_django:1.5,1.5.1

There are a few more bits you’ll need to make this work - let’s take a look at the get_django_version code:

def get_django_version(app):
    with cd('~/webapps/%s/' % app):
        with hide('running', 'stdout'):
            with prefix('source env/bin/activate'):
                result = run('pip freeze | grep "^Django=="')
                django, version=result.split('==')
                return version

If the version get_django_version returns matches the version I’m looking to upgrade, then we run upgrade_django_install, which is just this:

def upgrade_django_install(app, version):
    with cd('~/webapps/%s/' % app):
        with prefix('source env/bin/activate'):
            run('pip install Django==%s' % version)
            run('apache2/bin/restart')

Never again will I have to do a Django upgrade “by hand”.

You can take a look at the full code on GitHub.

  1. They all have their virtualenv in webapps/appname/env, for example. ↩︎

  2. Since I run sites for various organisations, most of them have their own Webfaction account. ↩︎

#django