A pleasingly smooth deploy this morning, allowing us to bring you some new features we hope you’ll like:
The web tab now has the option to specify a virtualenv, which will then be used by the uWSGI workers that run your web app. This avoids the ugly exec activate_this hack we had to recommend, and should avoid issues with shadowing. More info here and here.
Thanks to Conrad (yay new guy!), we’ve added tmux and mutt as available binaries in consoles, for all you terminal wizzzards out there.
And we’re doing a soft launch of our (very lean, very early) education beta. We’ve started to built out some more features to make PythonAnywhere a great place to teach + learn Python, so do get in touch if you’re and educator and want to get involved.
That’s about that! Keep hassling us for new features, and we’ll keep trying to deliver them as soon as we can…
A lot of people are talking about the problems that are being caused by a recent
change to taxation in the EU;
this TechCrunch article
gives a nice overview of the issues. But we thought it would be fun just to
tell about our experience - for general interest, and as an example of what one
UK startup had to do to implement these changes. Short version: it hasn’t been fun.
We released a bunch of updates to PythonAnywhere today :-) Short version:
we’ve made some improvements to the iPad and Android experience, applied fixes
to our in-browser console, added a bunch of new pre-installed packages, done a
big database upgrade that should make unplanned outages rarer and shorter, and
made changes required by EU VAT legislation (EU customers will soon be charged
their local VAT rate instead of UK VAT).
Obviously, the most important thing we did was to switch out our javascript console for a new one that supports 256 colours! And slightly more sane copy + paste. And it works on Android, or at least it does on Lollipop. Giles recommends the Hackers keyboard. Still doesn’t work on my blackberry though.
For the curious, it’s based on hterm which is a part of Chromium…
Some new packages
Of secondary importance, we added a few new packages, including TA-lib, pytesseract, and a thing called ruffus.
Improved logging of scheduled tasks
Scheduled tasks now log directly to files in /var/log, rather than storing their output in our database. That means they’ll get log-rotated like everything else in there, and if you call flush on your sys.stdout, you may even be able to see live updates while tasks are still running. I think.
New database type supported.
Oh, and we also released a new database type, it’s called Postgres, I’m told it’s quite popular. Skip on over to the accounts page and get yourself a Custom account if you want to check it out.
We had an outage this morning that lasted about an hour. We’ve established the cause, fixed the problem, and all sites are now back up. Apologies to all those affected. More detail follows.
A maintenance release today, so nothing too exciting. Still, a couple of things you may care about:
We’ve updated to Ubuntu Trusty. Although we weren’t vulnerable to shellshock, it’s nice to have the updated Bash, and to be on an LTS release
We’ve added an oft-requested feature to be able to view all your running console processes. You’ll find it at the bottom of the consoles page. The UI probably needs a bit of work, you need to hit refresh to update the list, but it’s a solution for when you think you have some detached processes chewing up your CPU quota! Let us know what you think.
Other than that, we’ve updated our client-side for our Postgres beta to 9.4, and added some of the PostGIS utilities. (Email us if you want to check out the beta). We also fixed an issue where a redirect loop would break the “reload” button on web apps, and we’ve added weasyprint and python-svn to the batteries included.
OK, so we already have a free account, but we’d like to give out a free trial of our most popular paid plan, the “Web Developer” plan. Here’s what you have to do to claim your free schtuff.
We’ve just updated PythonAnywhere, and there’s some great news: Postgres is now in beta! We’ve switched it on for a select list of beta testers; if you’d like to join, drop us a line at support@pythonanywhere.com.
There have also been some minor tweaks and updates:
New installed packages: OpenCV, the libproj Ubuntu package (useful for some Python GIS packages), WeasyPrint,
General website speedup (improved minifying of CSS and JavaScript).
The “Web” and “Databases” tabs remember which sub-tab you’re on between visits.
Better validation on the web tab.
The page displayed for web apps that have their DNS set up to route to PythonAnywhere but haven’t been set up has a better explanation of what’s going on.
We’ve been working on incorporating a Postgres database service into
PythonAnywhere, and we decided to make it into a bit of a standalone project.
The shiny is that we’re using Docker to containerise Postgres servers for our
users, and while we were at it we thought we’d try a bit of a different approach
to testing. I’d be interested in feedback – what do you like, what might you
do differently?
