How do I use a conda environment with mod_wsgi?

Question

My first post, and I'm new to both Python and Apache, so please go easy on me. I have a Python web application in a conda environment that serves up content just fine using Flask. Now I need to serve everything with Apache instead of Flask. I can get Apache to run Python with mod_wsgi, but only with virtualenv. I tried installing virtualenv with Anaconda, but I received a warning that such a setup is unsupported and not recommended. So my question is this:

How do I set up Apache to run my application in a conda environment?

Here, there's a section on working with virtual environments, and it says I need to enter a line into my wsgi file showing where to find activate_this.py. A virtualenv virtual environment has activate_this.py, but a conda environment does not. It seems that without the right instructions for activating the virtual environment, I'm just getting error 500 in my browser and "Import error: no module named flask" in my httpd error_log.

This is in my httpd.conf file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     DocumentRoot /var/www
     WSGIScriptAlias / var/www/tsm.wsgi
     <Directory /var/www/tsm>
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all
     </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

And here is tsm.wsgi:

import sys
import site
site.addsitedir('~/.conda/envs/tsm/lib/python2.7/site-packages')
sys.path.insert(0, '/var/www/tsm/server/time_series_machine')
sys.stdout = sys.stderr
from app import app as application

Any ideas? Thanks for any help you can provide.

Answer 1

I'm late to the party on this but I was having the same problem. For what its worth, I didn't have to recompile anything and was able to get this to work by including something like this in my VirtualHost configuration using the system-installed mod_wsgi:

WSGIDaemonProcess mysite python-path=/path/to/anaconda2/lib/python2.7/site-packages

Note that this points to the site-packages directory.

Answer 2

To add to @dino's answer, you can also install mod_wsgi into your root conda environment:

# Instal `mod_wsgi`
$ pip install mod_wsgi

# Find the full path to installed `mod_wsgi`
$ which mod_wsgi-express

# Install and register the `mod_wsgi` module with Apache
$ sudo /full/path/to/installed/mod_wsgi-express install-module

You can then create conda environments for multiple sites:

# Create 3 conda environments
conda create -n mysite1 python django
conda create -n mysite2 python django
conda create -n mysite3 python django

And set WSGIDaemonProcess in the Apache site configuration file to use the appropriate environment for each site:

# /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mysite1.conf
WSGIDaemonProcess mysite1 python-path=/path/to/anaconda3/envs/mysite1/lib/python3.5/site-packages

# /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mysite2.conf
WSGIDaemonProcess mysite2 python-path=/path/to/anaconda3/envs/mysite2/lib/python3.5/site-packages

# /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mysite3.conf
WSGIDaemonProcess mysite3 python-path=/path/to/anaconda3/envs/mysite3/lib/python3.5/site-packages