I`m trying to develop a simple plugin for the Editra editor for django development. Right now it can create django projects and apps from within the editor. The editor is based on wxPython and I want to start the devserver from within the editor, show a simple form with the option to stop or kill/restart the server.
The goal is to minimize the need to do repetetive tasks in the console/shell. My reason for doing this is that I am working in a Microsoft only company where you seldom do stuff using the command line. Selling django is hard when I am in and out of the shell/command line to start/restart the server, syncdb, migrate etc. To make the job of selling django to my co-workers and hopefully make development easier ( at least for the django developers who likes to work in an IDE ) I have started the work on a plugin for Editra.
Right now the plugin adds a menu item called Django with two subitems; create project and create app. A context menu is in the works which will give different options depending on the content of the file being edited; right click in a window holding settings.py will give you the option to start the devserver, call syncdb, migrate if south is installed, create superuser etc. A right click in views.py will give you options to help you generate views or templates, in models.py scaffolding or generation of admin.py etc.
The only thing I cannot get my head around is how to start/kill/restart the devserver from inside the app. What I really like is to have a small window floating around with two buttons; stop or restart, which will -- stop or restart the devserver. Or a play and stop button inside the editor doing the same thing. The problem is controlling the devserver process from within the app.
If anybody has any information about this I would be very grateful. Any help, input, comments or ideas are appreciated.
Regards, Thomas Weholt
You'll want to use Python's subprocess module to launch and kill the dev server process, I imagine: http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html
You're probably most interested in the Popen object. With it you can launch and kill the dev server.