Ryan J. Dillon ryanjdillon

Dreamhost supplies a fairly old version of Python in their shared hosting environments. It recently became necessary for me to use a newer version, and since this involved a bit of juggling, and since I’m also likely to forget how I did it, I thought I’d detail the steps here. These instructions should work with any Dreamhost shared hosting user, but follow them at your own risk.

The end result of this process is being able to run a current version of Python from your shared hosting user’s shell. It requires compiling, installing and running Python from your home directory rather than the system bin directories.

1. Create a helpful working directory
I chose to install all Python-related stuff in a python/ directory under my user’s home directory.

$ mkdir ~/python
$ cd ~/python

Cython

Cython has two major benefits:

Making python code faster, particularly things that can't be done in scipy/numpy
Wrapping/interfacing with C/C++ code

Cython gains most of it's benefit from statically typing arguments. However, statically typing is not required, in fact, regular python code is valid cython (but don't expect much of a speed up). By incrementally adding more type information, the code can speed up by several factors. This gist just provides a very basic usage of cython.

README

Create a template service file at /etc/systemd/system/[email protected]. The template parameter will correspond to the name of target host:

[Unit]
Description=Setup a secure tunnel to %I
After=network.target

	# coding=utf8

	# Copyright (C) 2011 Saúl Ibarra Corretgé <[email protected]>
	#

	# Some inspiration taken from: http://www.morethantechnical.com/2009/03/05/qt-opencv-combined-for-face-detecting-qwidgets/

	import cv
	import sys

	upstream tunnel {
	server 127.0.0.1:3000;
	}

	server {
	listen 80;
	server_name dev.codeplane.com br.dev.codeplane.com;

	location / {
	proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;

	/build/
	*.so
	*.cpp
	/cachegrind.out.profilestats
	/profilestats.prof
	/build1darray.s

	import pyodbc
	import numpy as np
	import datetime
	import pandas

	def processCursor(cur, dataframe=False):
	datatypes = []
	colinfo = cur.description
	for col in colinfo:
	if col[1] == unicode:

	git clean -xfd
	git submodule foreach --recursive git clean -xfd
	git reset --hard
	git submodule foreach --recursive git reset --hard
	git submodule update --init --recursive

	import numpy as np
	class ConfusionMatrix:
	"""
	Simple confusion matrix class
	row is the true class, column is the predicted class
	"""
	def __init__(self, n_classes, class_names=None):
	self.n_classes = n_classes
	if class_names is None:
	self.class_names = map(str, range(n_classes))

	"""
	Minimal character-level Vanilla RNN model. Written by Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy)
	BSD License
	"""
	import numpy as np

	# data I/O
	data = open('input.txt', 'r').read() # should be simple plain text file
	chars = list(set(data))
	data_size, vocab_size = len(data), len(chars)