berkeley dbxml django mod_wsgi not working with error: 'finally' pops bad exception

Question

I have a python/django application, 'mysite', which connects to bdbxml. The application works fine using the django development server but fails when run using mod_wsgi with apache - my chosen route for production. Specifically it is the parts of the application that connect to the database that fail with a very unhelpful message, 'finally' pops bad exception.

I believe from googling that this error is a generic error that is generated by C++ applications when there is no other error message to generate, but I am not a C++ expert so don't really know what it means.

My views.py function looks like:

def dbquery(request):
  mgr = XmlManager()
  container = mgr.openContainer("/wsgi/mysite/mysite.bdbxml")
  results = container.getAllDocuments(0)
  for value in results:
    document = value.asDocument()
    return HttpResponse (document.getName())

my django.wsgi file (using the suggested format from Graham Dumpleton) looks like:

import os, sys

sys.path.append('/wsgi')
sys.path.append('/wsgi/mysite')

import settings

import django.core.management
django.core.management.setup_environ(settings)
utility = django.core.management.ManagementUtility()
command = utility.fetch_command('runserver')

command.validate()

import django.conf
import django.utils

django.utils.translation.activate(django.conf.settings.LANGUAGE_CODE)

import django.core.handlers.wsgi

application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

and httpd.conf looks like:

WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}

WSGIScriptAlias / /wsgi/mysite/apache/django.wsgi

<Directory /wsgi/mysite>
  Order deny,allow
  Allow from all
</Directory>

Does anyone know how to solve this problem?

thanks

Update

Following suggestion by Graham Dumpleton below that the problem may be linked to permissions on the database, here is the output of ls -las showing permissions on the directory where the database is located. All files and folders are owned by apache.

  4 drwxr-xr-x 5 apache apache   4096 May  5 06:26 .
  4 drwxr-xr-x 3 apache apache   4096 May  4 22:09 ..
  4 drwxr-xr-x 2 apache apache   4096 May  5 14:52 apache
  4 -rw-r--r-- 1 apache apache     16 May  5 05:05 index.html
  4 -rw-r--r-- 1 apache apache     12 May  5 04:52 index.html~
  0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 apache apache      0 May  4 22:09 __init__.py
  4 -rw-r--r-- 1 apache apache    114 May  5 05:39 __init__.pyc
  4 -rw-rw-r-- 1 apache apache    503 May  4 22:09 manage.py
164 -rwxr-xr-x 1 apache apache 163840 May  5 05:23 mysite.bdbxml
  4 drwxr-xr-x 2 apache apache   4096 May  5 05:26 scripts  
  8 -rw-rw-r-- 1 apache apache   5060 May  5 04:50 settings.py
  8 -rw-rw-r-- 1 apache apache   5031 May  4 22:09 settings.py~
  4 -rw-r--r-- 1 apache apache   2784 May  5 05:39 settings.pyc
  4 drwxr-xr-x 2 apache apache   4096 May  5 04:49 templates
  4 -rw-rw-r-- 1 apache apache    639 May  5 05:32 urls.py
  4 -rw-rw-r-- 1 apache apache    600 May  5 04:42 urls.py~
  4 -rw-r--r-- 1 apache apache    444 May  5 05:40 urls.pyc
  4 -rw-r--r-- 1 apache apache    609 May  5 06:26 views.py
  4 -rw-r--r-- 1 apache apache    609 May  5 06:26 views.py~
  4 -rw-r--r-- 1 apache apache    914 May  5 06:26 views.pyc

Answer 1

Having gone through a complete re-install I can now confirm that Graham's comments were spot on and correct. The issue was related to permissions.

Once the apache process was made the owner of the directory containing the application and the database files it all started working.

$chown -R apache:apache /wsgi

Thanks!