Hi there! I am in the process of writing a (generalized) service to ease deployment of Python/Django web applications. I managed to get the service up and running (using gunicorn to serve dynamic web request and nginx to serve static files) but I stumble over one crucial point in the process. Django uses it's own, project-specific administration script (manage.py) as an interface to (admin) users - to collect static files from the project to a specifies location, to get access to the database, to get into an interactive (Python) shell, etc.
The most beautiful (in a Django perspective) would be to simply proxy calls to the manage.py script through a Shepherd action (i.e. invoking `herd manage django-service-foobar createsuperuser` would call `manage.py createsuperuser`). Other options could be to manually write simplified Shepherd actions for (a subset) of manage.py calls (i.e. the most important/common ones). Now I've stumbled on the following two issues and hope for some guidance: a) Django needs a python-import statement-like string to select the correct settings module (this is passed as a command-line argument to gunicorn, which works just fine, but needs to be set as an env var (DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE) for manage.py), and b) some of the manage.py commands are interactive, which would work great if I found a way to route input/output ports through the Shepherd action. And here comes my question: What is the easiest/best/most Guix way to call the manage.py script and have input/output ports routed back to stdin/stdout? Calling (invoke) from a Shepherd action seems to swallow all of the process' output and fails on processes that expect input - and I have not figured out how to set an envvar for that called process. (fork+exec-command) allows setting envvars as an option, but posts the commands output to a file (/var/log/messages as default) which I could live with but it's not optimal/user friendly. Thanks for all helpful input in advance (and probably again when I managed to solve the issue with your help) gabber
