Apache hangs with Django Application and Matplotlib

Question

Very stuck here and I don't have a whole lot to go on. I had a django application up and running and I started playing around with graphing using NetworkX and Matplotlib to visualize some of the data for a poster. I then tried to use the site again and got the error:

'/var/www' is not a writable dir; you must set /var/www/.matplotlib to be a writable dir. You can also set environment variable MPLCONFIGDIR to any writable directory where you want matplotlib data stored

Which I resolved by chmod'ding the directory. The site's homepage then loads fine but when I try to load any other page that django renders apache just hangs. I set the log level to debug and tail'ed it but it's not showing any new requests or errors or anything, it just sorta hangs until the browser gives up. I then thought it must just be an error with something that I just did so I reverted back to a working version in my repo and am having the same problem. Django's test server is still running the site fine which is leading me to believe that it's a problem with apache (of the whole thing apache is the part I have the least experience with).

my httpd.conf looks like:

ServerName >> my server <<
TraceEnable off
AcceptFilter http none
AcceptFilter https none
EnableMMAP off
EnableSendfile off

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin >> my email <<
    ServerName >> my server <<
    DocumentRoot /Web/public/
    <Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>
    WSGIScriptAlias / /home/$USER/$APP/$APP/wsgi.py
    <Directory /Web/public/static>
        Options -Indexes
    </Directory>
    Alias /static /Web/public/static
    Alias /media /Web/public/media
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
    LogLevel debug
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
    Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
    <Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
        Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Please let me know if you have any thoughts, or need any more info.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I had the same problem; Apache/Django would not work but manage.py runserver would work fine. I tried making the default directory readable, and I tried changing MPLCONFIGDIR with export MPLCONFIGDIR=/stuff/, but the only thing that worked was placing

import os
os.environ[ 'MPLCONFIGDIR' ] = '/tmp/'

BEFORE importing matplotlib. Only one page uses MPL in my case, so placing this 'everywhere' was acceptable to me.

Taken from original solution by steko.