Posts filed under Django
Posted on October 23, 2012 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under:
Django,
Open Source,
Python
Tags:
cms,
opensource,
rvcms,
django
Today I have finally decided to open up my Django based CMS (rvcms) as open source, using a BSD type license.
I created this CMS a while ago as a need for a CMS that runs on top of Django, but since then other (much better) content management systems for Django have been released, such as Django-CMS and Mezzanine.
Although my CMS is a bit rough around the edges, I am still not giving up on it entirely. I do like aspects of my CMS, it's simple, it's lightweight and it works well enough to use on most sites.
The only thing still missing is documentation on how to install it or use it, sorry, but there is a setup.py script now at least so you can install the CMS in a virtualenv, which is only a start.
The requirements for the CMS at this stage are Django 1.3, but I am planning to get it back upto scratch and working with Django 1.4 and give it a bit of a cleanup. The rest of the requirements are all listed in setup.py.
In the long run however, I am looking into writing a new CMS using the Pyramid web framework, which I have come to love over the last year or so, but still keep this CMS going for existing sites for a while.
The CMS source code is located on Bitbucket.
Posted on August 11, 2011 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under:
Django,
Python
Tags:
latex,
pdf,
python,
django
In the last week, I have been learning how to use LaTeX, a markup style language used to create professional documents. I have been using Texmaker on Linux, an excellent cross-platform LaTeX editor. I thought it would be pretty cool to generate PDF documents from a Django view using the pdflatex command line app, and using the Django template engine for adding dynamic content to .tex files before rendering them to PDF.
Here is the code I wrote that does this, it renders the LaTeX template to a string first. It then uses tempfile.mkstemp() to generate a unique temporary file name for use for the generated PDF file, mkstemp returns both the filename and a file descriptor to the temporary file. When we load the contents of the PDF file into a string, we should use os.fdopen() with this file descriptor, rather than just use open(), which is the proper way to work with temporary files.
When we run pdflatex, we pipe the rendered .tex template to stdin, so we don't have to save it to disk. Unfortunately, pdflatex cannot return a generated PDF over stdout the same way and it only saves a PDF to disk, which is why we have to use the temporary file method.
After the PDF is rendered, we load ithe PDF file and return it as an attachment over the response. We then delete any temporary files created, including the PDF file.
import os
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
from tempfile import mkstemp
from django.http import HttpResponse, Http404
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from django.template import RequestContext
def render_latex(request, template, dictionary, filename):
# render latex template and vars to a string
latex = render_to_string(template, dictionary, context_instance=None)
# create a unique temorary filename
fd, path = mkstemp(prefix="latex_", suffix=".pdf")
folder, fname = os.path.split(path)
jobname, ext = os.path.splitext(fname) # jobname is just the filename without .pdf, it's what pdflatex uses
# for the TOC to be built, pdflatex must be run twice, on the second run it will generate a .toc file
for i in range(2):
# start pdflatex, we can send the tex file from stdin, but the output file can only be saved to disk, not piped to stdout unfortunately/
process = Popen(["pdflatex", "-output-directory", folder, "-jobname", jobname], stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE) # piping stdout suppresses output messages
process.communicate(latex)
# open the temporary pdf file for reading.
try:
pdf = os.fdopen(fd, "rb")
output = pdf.read()
pdf.close()
except OSError:
raise Http404("Error generating PDF file") # maybe we should use an http 500 here, 404 makes no sense
# generate the response with pdf attachment
response = HttpResponse(mimetype="application/pdf")
response["Content-Disposition"] = "attachment; filename=" + filename
response.write(output)
# delete the pdf from temp directory, and other generated files ending on .aux and .log
for ext in (".pdf", ".aux", ".log", ".toc", ".lof", ".lot", ".synctex.gz"):
try:
os.remove(os.path.join(folder, jobname) + ext)
except OSError:
pass
# return the response
return response
#### Actual Usage ####
def someview(request):
return render_latex(request, "reports/test.tex", {"foo": "bar"}, filename="latex_test.pdf")