Remote Jobs using Django

The following briefly explains how to put up a local Django webinterface and how to synchronise it with jobs submitted to a server. No particular knowledge of Django is required, except if you wish to setup a permanent web server for keeping track of jobs states.

Dependencies and preliminary notes

The web interface depends on Django 1.3 (or newer) which can be obtained using easy_install as follows

easy_install django

The web interface can be located in any directory. We will in the following assume that it is located in ~/remoteweb/.

Starting a local server

Open bash and execute following commands:

cd ~/remoteweb/
python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py runserver

This will start the local web server which can be accessed on the address http://localhost:8000/. In order to synchronise the jobs from a given server simply type

python mange.py update_database [appName [server[:port]]]

where [appName] is ‘remoteJobs-vistrails’ if you are using VisTrails with the standard settings and [server] is the name of the server. If no server is supplied the script will assume that you wish to work on the local machine. If a server name is supplied the script will prompt for username and password. After entering these the database is updated with the jobs which has previously been submitted to the server.

Webinterface

In order to access the web interface go to http://localhost:8000/ in your favorite browser. A list of should now appear

which has been optimised for running on mobile units. From the webinterface you can see the status of your jobs, cancel or resubmit them. The changes take effect whenever

python mange.py update_database [appName [server[:port]]]

has been executed.