Arch Linux / ARM / MacOS / Python / Raspberry Pi

surprise! django runs on arch linux arm on a rasperry pi 3 after all!

whbeebe

tl;dr: It was permissions issues that kept Django from executing properly on Arch ARM and the Raspberry Pi 3. Read on for the details.

Well, looks like I have to walk back that snide comment about Arch running on a Raspberry Pi 3. While I’m certainly no hero, I was irritated considerably by Django’s flagrant failure, enough to find out why. But first, some background.

  1. Django, along with a lot of other Python packages, is located in the system’s site-packages directory. On the RPi 3 running Arch ARM it’s /usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages. The site-packages directory is owned by root (root:root) with permissions 755. Permissions 755 means root can read/write, while group and the world can only read and execute from that directory.
  2. With that kind of ownership I had to install Django with ‘sudo pip install django’ (without the quotes, obviously). After installation every directory had 750 permissions, and every file had 640 permissions, with root:root ownership. That means, using the non-root account alarm, I had no permissions to read anything in the django installation.
  3. And thus any attempt to use django-admin was bound to fail

I don’t have copious amounts of time to work on these kinds of issues. So while I was out working on my honey-do list, while at Trader Joes in the organic produce section, the light went on as to what the probable problem and solution was. Sure enough, when I got home and found a minute to look, that’s when I found the permission settings all wrong. A quick ‘sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \+’ and ‘sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 644{}\+’ fixed things up, and I was able to get a quick and dirty Django web server up and running. In fact, to test a capability I’ll need, I tarred up the sample I built on the MBP, secure copied it over to the RPi 3, untarred it there, and got it up and running. Here’s a couple of screen shots of it in action on the RPi 3:

Looks like I’m back in business. The only thing I edited on the RPi 3 was the polls/views.py with vi to change the text output by views.py. Other than that, I simply started it up.

This is the first time I’ve ever had a problem with permissions using pip and Python. In the future I’m going to have to be careful with Arch ARM. It’s a small issue, considering everything else works just fine.