Scanning your PythonAnywhere Account for Common Errors

Over the years, many students have followed the instructions for this class and have completed the assignments following the provided instructions. But sometimes things go wrong and students lose track of where they are at in the instructions and they start an Internet search or use AI for solutions or go back and try to re-do steps that have already been completed.

Sometimes you are following a tutorial online and the assignment has instructed you to do some steps differently on PythonAnywhere. Sometimes the "do this a little differently" recommedation is difficult to remmber while doing an assignment and instructions get done out of order or more then once.

We have built a tool to catch and let you know about some of the common mistakes that happen when something goes wrong in the middle of the instructions for an assignment.

You should probably run this checkup tool between assignments. Reasonable times might be before you start the next assignment or after you complete the previous assignment.

Running the Checkup Tool on PythonAnywhere

The checkup tool is installed in your ~/dj4e-samples folder when you did the first assignment to install Django on PythonAnywhere.

The following commands will get the latest version of the checkup tool and run it:

cd ~/dj4e-samples
git checkout django52
git pull origin django52

bash ~/dj4e-samples/tools/checkup.sh

If there are no issues, it should say:

Checkup complete

It will include your home directory and a simple digital signature.

What Might Be Wrong

The checkup checks if you are running in the right virtual enviroment and if the Python version and Django version in the virtual environment are correct. It also checks your folder structure for common mistakes and patches your manage.py to add some PythonAnywhere specific code.

If there are errors, you might see messages like these:

• You are not running in a virtual environment, please consult the DJ4E install instructions.

• You are running in an out-of-date Django 4.2 virtual environment - you should be running ve52 - see DJ4E install instructions

• Not running in virtual environment ve52 - please consult the DJ4E install instructions.

• Failure: Python version 3.8.1 is outside the required range 3.10.0 to 3.13.9

• Failure: Django version 4.2.7 is NOT within the range 5.2.0 to 5.2.9

• The folder ~/djangotutorial should not exist - we use ~/django_projects instead - you should remove ~/djangotutorial to avoid confusion

• The folder ~/mysite should not exist - we use ~/django_projects/mysite instead - you should remove ~/mysite to avoid confusion

There are lots of ways to end up in these situations. Figuring these out and fixing them is not part of the learning objectives of the course - you should get some help if you need to fix things up.

Over time as new mistakes are found in office hours or help sessions we can add new checks to the checkup tool to make the logistics of this course easier for everyone.