Executing command line script from Django & Python

Question

I'm building a Django management command which is creating website screenshots using Paul Hammond's webkit2png script (http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/) and stores them into my DB.

For this command I'm using the 'call' command from 'subprocess'. How do I execute this command in specific directory (temp/ under django project in this case)? My current code looks like this but it doesn't find the script to execute which is stored in my virtualenv site-packages folder:

import os

from django.core.management.base import NoArgsCommand
from django.conf import settings
from subprocess import call

# Models
from reviews.models import Shop

class Command(NoArgsCommand):
    def handle_noargs(self, **options):
        # Shops
        shops = Shop.objects.all()

        path = os.path.join(settings.SITE_ROOT, '../env/lib/python2.6/site-packages')

        for shop in shops:
            print shop
            command = "cd temp; python %s/webkit2png.py -F %s" % (path, shop.url)
            call([command])

            # Read the screenshot file and insert to model's ImageField

Mike DeSimone · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-28 03:00:04Z

2

You need to use the cwd parameter to call. Also I'd recommend normalizing the path before using it.

path = os.path.normpath(os.path.join(settings.SITE_ROOT, 
    '../env/lib/python2.6/site-packages'))

for shop in shops:
    print shop
    call(["python", path + "/webkit2png.py", "-F", shop.url], cwd="temp")

# Read the screenshot file and insert to model's ImageField

call takes the same arguments as Popen. You might find some more things there that help out as well. Also, it's best to split your command-line tokens up as separate strings in the list passed to call and leave the shell parameter at its default False. This way, you don't have to worry about shell escaping, quoting, or whatever messing up your parameters.

answered Mar 28, 2011 at 3:00

Mike DeSimone

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Comments

Ghislain Leveque · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-28 12:00:11Z

0

This does not answer your question directly but : why do you need to use subprocess to call a python script ? You could just look at the "__main__" code in the webkit2png.py file, import it and use it.

answered Jul 28, 2010 at 12:00

Ghislain Leveque

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1 Comment

jorilallo Over a year ago

This is something that I would usually do but the main() code in this case is a bit complex and it saves the results in files.

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