For want of a nail...

Today, I wanted to create a new page on this site for my RailsConf talk next week. This site is hosted on Google App Engine (seemed like a good idea at the time). I wrote the site in a microframework for App Engine called Tipfy (seemed like a good idea at the time) under Python 2.5.

A couple of years later, Tipfy is no longer maintained and Python 2.5 on App Engine is deprecated. The site still runs, but even adding new static pages is complicated because it’s difficult to get the app running locally.

I tried that today, started making changes, remembered old_dev_appserver.py, tried that, and still couldn’t get it running. At that point I gave up and decided a quick port to Flask was in order.

Unfortunately, I had problems getting Flask installed, because pip wouldn’t install packages into the lib directory. I got the error error: must supply either home or prefix/exec-prefix -- not both which I think might be related to the fact that I’m using homebrew installed Python, but couldn’t find any information about.

I was able to work around that by installing the packages without a destination directory and then I copying them into my lib directory manually. Once Flask was installed, I could begin the port, which fortunately went quickly because both Flask and Tipfy are based on Jinja2 and Werkzeug.

So I spent all afternoon rewriting my blog engine. And now I need to make that page for RailsConf…