Sep 11, 2014 by harry

[cross-posted at Obey The Testing Goat!]

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?

Aug 21, 2014 by harry

Today’s upgrade included a few new packages in the standard server image:

• OpenSCAD
• FreeCAD
• inkscape
• Pillow for 3.3 and 3.4
• flask-bootstrap
• gensim
• textblob

We also improved the default “Unhandled Exception” page, which is shown when a users’ web app allows an exception to bubble up to our part of the stack. We now include a slightly friendlier message, explaining to any of the users’ users that there’s an error, and explaining to the user where they can find their log files and look for debug info.

And in the background, we’ve deployed a bunch of infrastructure changes related to postgres support. We’re getting there, slowly slowly!

Oh yes, and we’ve enabled dynamic previews in the forums, so you get an idea of how the markdown syntax will translate. It actually uses the same library as stackoverflow, it’s called pagedown. Hope you find ’em useful!

Aug 20, 2014 by giles

Our founder, Giles Thomas, gave a high-level introduction to our load-balancing system as a talk at this summer’s EuroPython. There’s a video up on PyVideo: An HTTP request’s journey through a platform-as-a-service. And here are the slides [PDF].

Aug 14, 2014 by harry

This position is now filled

Fancy helping to build the Python world’s favourite PaaS (probably)? We’re looking for a “junior” programmer with plenty of smarts to come and join the team, learn the stuff we do, and inject some new ideas…

Aug 6, 2014 by glenn

Here’s what’s new in the latest version of PythonAnywhere that we released this morning:

• User files are now on SSDs, so we’re expecting to see some performance improvements.
• We’ve implemented a fix for the issue that we believe has been causing the recent outages and database access issues.
• We’ve improved the general security of the PythonAnywhere web site.
• We’ve added some minor fixes to the user interface

Jul 16, 2014 by glenn

After a lengthy outage last night, we want to let you know about the events that led up to it and how we can improve our outage responses to reduce or eliminate downtime when things go wrong.

Jun 20, 2014 by giles

This morning we upgraded PythonAnywhere, and the upgrade process took much longer than expected. Here’s what happened.

Jun 20, 2014 by giles

We released a new version of PythonAnywhere this morning. There were some nasty problems with the go-live (more about that later) but here’s what we added:

• Python 3.4 support, both for web applications and consoles.
• sftp and rsync
• Move from Amazon’s us-east-1a region to us-east-1c – this will allow us to switch to newer, faster instances next week!
• And various minor bugfixes.

Thanks to gregdelozier, Malcolm, robert, aaronzimmerman, Cartroo, barnsey, andmalc, corvax, giorgostzampanakis, dominochinese, stablum, algoqueue for the suggestions.

May 29, 2014 by harry

A minor release today, which included:

• A fix for the cairo/matplotlib regression
• Tweaks to log file permissions, to prevent an issue where they would become non-readable by the user
• Moving from several smaller servers to fewer larger ones, for web and console servers. Overall visible performance impact should be minor, but positive.

Happy coding everyone!

May 6, 2014 by glenn

It’s been about 6 months since we last delivered a state-of-the-PythonAnywhere address and, looking at everything that’s happened since the last one, it’s long-overdue.

Following the extremely … mixed … reaction to our upworthy/buzzfeed spoof report, we decided to gauge the reaction if we went in totally the opposite direction. So let’s get straight into PythonAnywhere’s very first newsletter of 2014 — the “style is for wimps” edition!