This morning’s system update went smoothly :-)
It was primarily a maintenance update, bringing our US-based system up to the same version as our EU-based system. There were a number of minor bugfixes, along with a bunch of improvements to our system administration tools, which won’t be visible to you, but do mean that we’ll be able to spend less time on admin stuff – which gives us more time to work on adding cool new features!
We’re proud to announce today that we now have an EU-hosted PythonAnywhere system :-) You can access it at eu.pythonanywhere.com. It’s completely separated from our normal system, but has all of the same features – plus billing in euros.
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The blog post below has now been “promoted” to being an official help page – you can read the most current version here. The version below is the original published version and may be out of date.
We sometimes get emails from people who are trying to point their custom domain at PythonAnywhere so that they can host their website, but are struggling to set up their DNS settings. Normally DNS setup is pretty simple, but sometimes people can get bogged down due to confusing interfaces on their registrar’s site, or complexities in the terminology people use.
The parts of DNS that you need to know about in order to host a website are actually not all that complicated, but some domain registrars have complicated, hard-to-understand interfaces. Either they assume that you understand all of the technical details about how the whole thing works – which makes it hard for first-timers – or they try to put a simple user-friendly interface on top of it, but simplify it so much that it’s actually harder to use because they’re hiding important stuff from you.
Given that basic DNS stuff really isn’t all that hard, we felt that it would be a good idea to post an explanation, going from the basics up to some slightly deeper stuff. This post is written so that if you only want the basics, you can just read the first part, while if you want a deeper understanding – either out of interest, or because your domain registrar has got such a low-level interface that you need to – then you can keep reading.
It’s worth noting that for most people, you don’t need to know any of this stuff to set up a website on PythonAnywhere, even with a custom domain; it’s meant more as an explanation so that people who do run into problems with their registrar have the background knowledge they need to solve the problem – or, indeed, to explain to the registrar’s tech support team what the problem is. And, of course, it’s a bit of light reading for people who are just interested in this stuff :-)
Read more…After our system update yesterday, there was a period when some people’s scheduled tasks were running slowly. This is an update on what caused the issue and what we did to fix it.
Read more…This morning’s system update went pretty smoothly, and we have some cool new stuff to announce:
You can now get an HTTPS certificate for your custom domain using Let’s Encrypt without all that tedious mucking around with dehydrated – and you don’t need to remember to renew the certificate either, or even set up a scheduled task to renew your certificate for you.
Just go to the new “HTTPS certificate” line in the “Security” section of the “Web” tab. You’ll see a pencil icon next to the kind of certificate you have (which will probably be “None” or “Custom”). Click the pencil, and you’ll see that there’s an option called “Auto-renewed Let’s Encrypt certificate”. If you select that and click “Save”, we’ll get a fresh certificate for your site from Let’s Encrypt – and well before it expires, our system will automatically renew it for you.
If you have a certificate that you’ve bought from some other organisation like Comodo or GoDaddy, you can also configure it from here – select the “Custom certificate” option, and you’ll get input fields where you can copy and paste the private key and the combined certificate.
We have detailed instructions with screenshots on the help site.
The old ways of setting up a certificate still work – you can use dehydrated, or get a certificate from a third party like GoDaddy, and upload everything using the command-line scripts.
New accounts created from today will use MySQL 5.7. If you’re still on 5.6 and would like your databases moved over to a 5.7-compatible server, get in touch over support@pythonanywhere.com – the move won’t happen until early next year, though.
Several people reported a problem where you could not run Selenium from website code from a Hacker account – you needed a Web Dev account or better. This was a bug, not a feature, so we fixed it :-)
There was a problem where people who had used all of their CPU allowance could continue to use lots of server resources; this isn’t something that would have been useful for anyone or that we think anyone was doing deliberately – it would only happen if they started processes which did nothing and then restarted. So it just meant that if one person had a certain kind of bug in their code and then went into the tarpit, they’d use up CPU that could have been put to better use by people who were actually trying to run working code :-) We’ve put a fix in place to stop that from happening.
Of course, there were the normal minor tweaks and bugfixes, but those are the highlights. A very happy holiday season to everyone, and we look forward to being able to show you some cool new stuff in the new year!
Always-on tasks are a new feature we rolled out in our last system update. Essentially, they’re a way you can specify a program and tell us that you want us to keep it running all the time. If it exits for any reason, we’ll automatically restart it – and even in extreme circumstances, for instance if the server that it’s running on has a hardware failure, it will fail over to a working machine quickly.
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We are officially live with our always-on tasks! All paying customers will get one always-on task, and you can add more by customizing your plan on our accounts page. Our infrastructure will try to keep your script always running (ie. we will restart it if your script errors and stops etc). We’d love to know what you think- Just drop us a line using the “Feedback” link, or email us at support@pythonanywhere.com!
We have also improved user experience working with log files. You can now access our API to delete log files (or wipe the file if your particular log file is currently in use), and we have better formatting in place when logging certain web app errors.
We also optimized the editor that you can access from the ‘Files’ tab to make consoles within it start faster and to avoid scripts rerunning unintentionally.
This blog post is out-of-date – we can now manage all of your Let’s Encrypt certificates automatically. See this help page for details.
Let’s Encrypt certificates are really useful for custom domains – you can get HTTPS working on your site for free. Their one downside is that the certificate only lasts for 90 days, so you need to remember to renew it.
The good news is that you can set up a scheduled task to do that all for you – no need to put anything in your calendar.
Read more…One question we often hear from people starting out with PythonAnywhere is “how do I turn this script I’ve written into a website so that other people can run it?”
That’s actually a bigger topic than you might imagine, and a complete answer would wind up having to explain almost everything about web development. So we won’t do all of that in this blog post :-) The good news is that simple scripts can often be turned into simple websites pretty easily, and in this blog post we’ll work through a couple of examples.
Let’s get started!
Read more…Well, our last “monthly” newsletter was in September 2017. We must have shifted the bits in the period left one, or something like that :-)
Anyway, welcome to the September 2018 PythonAnywhere newsletter :-) Here’s what we’ve been up to.
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