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3.0. Using Wing IDE with Turbogears

Wing IDE is an integrated development environment for the Python programming language. Wing can be used to speed up the process of writing and debugging code that is written for Turbogears, a powerful web development system.

In order to debug Turbogears applications, you will need Wing 3.0 or later, since earlier versions did not support multi-threaded debugging.

Installing Turbogears

The Turbogears website provides complete instructions for installing Turbogears. The procedure varies slightly by OS.

Configuring Turbogears to use Wing

This section assumes your Turbogears project is called wingtest. If not, substitute your project name in the following instructions.

  • Go into the Turbogears instance directory wingtest and run Wing
  • Add your directory to the project and save it as wingtest.wpr
  • Open start-wingtest.py in Wing and set it as main debug file from the Debug menu

  • Edit start-wingtest.py and add the following before the server is started towards the end of the script:

    import os
if os.environ.has_key('WINGDB_ACTIVE'):
    cherrypy.config.update({'autoreload.on': False})

    This is needed to prevent creation of a sub-process controlled by the auto-restarter, which breaks debugging since Wing's debugger will not be running in the sub-process. If you omit this step, the symptom will be failure to stop on any breakpoints in your Turbogears application.

  • Set a breakpoint on the return line of Root.index() in your controllers.py or somewhere else you know will be reached on a page load
  • Start debugging in Wing from the toolbar or debug icon
  • Bring up the Debug I/O tool in Wing and wait until the server output shows that it has started
  • Load http://localhost:8080/ or the page you want to debug in a browser
  • Wing should stop on your breakpoint

Notes

Some packages installed by Turbogears are not in unpacked eggs so the debugger cannot show the source code. This can be fixed by unpacking the *.egg files that are zip files so that they are replaced with directories of the same name that contain the contents of the zip files. For example, on Linux:

mkdir tmp
mv cElementTree-1.0.5_20051216-py2.4-linux-i686.egg tmp
cd tmp
unzip cElementTree-1.0.5_20051216-py2.4-linux-i686.egg
cd ..
mv tmp cElementTree-1.0.5_20051216-py2.4-linux-i686.egg

Turbogears will install itself into whichever instance of Python runs the installer script, and only certain versions of Python work with a given version of Turbogears.

If you want to avoid adding Turbogears to an install of Python that you are using for other purposes, you can install Python to a new location and dedicate that instance to Turbogears. On Linux, this can be done as follows (assuming you create /your/path/to/turbogears as the place to install):

  • In a Python source dist do:
    ./configure --prefix=/your/path/to/turbogears
make
make install
  • Download tgsetup.py from the Turbogears website
  • Edit tgsetup.py and change the one occurence of /usr/local/bin to /your/path/to/turbogears/bin
  • Run /your/path/to/turbogears/bin/python tgsetup.py
  • Change to /your/path/to/turbogears
  • Run bin/tgadmin quickstart
  • Enter project name wingtest and defaults for the other options

Similar steps should work on Windows and OS X.

Related Documents

Wing IDE provides many other options and tools. For more information:

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