Troubleshooting Common Problems¶

This document is intended to serve as a knowledge repository - it should contain solutions to commonly encountered problems when running the OSF, as well as solutions to hard-to-debug issues that developers have encountered that might be seen by others in the course of their work

“Emails not working on my development server”¶

Solution: You may not have a celery worker running. If you have Celery and RabbitMQ installed (see the README for installation instructions), run invoke celery.

Less ideally, you can turn Celery off and send emails synchronously by adding USE_CELERY = False to your website/settings/local.py file.

“My view test keeps failing”¶

Solution: You have to reload the database record.

def test_change_name_view(self):
    user = UserFactory()
    # Hit some endpoint that updates the user's database record
    res = self.app.post_json('/{}/changename/'.format(user._primary_key),
        {'name': 'Freddie Mercurial'})
    user.reload()  # Make sure object is up to date
    assert_equal(res.status_code, 200)

ImportError: No module named five¶

Celery may raise an exception when attempting to run the OSF tests. A partial traceback:

Exception occurred:
  File "<...>", line 49, in <module>
    from kombu.five import monotonic
ImportError: No module named five

error: [Errno 61] Connection refused` is raised in ampq/transport.py¶

Solution: You may have to start your Rabbitmq and Celery workers.

$ invoke rabbitmq
$ invoke celery_worker

Error when importing uritemplate¶

If invoking assets or server commands throw an error about uritemplate, run the following to resolve the conflict:

pip uninstall uritemplate.py --yes
pip install uritemplate.py==0.3.0

and then re run the command that failed.

Using PyCharm’s Remote Debugger¶

Some debugging tasks make it difficult to use the standard debug tools (i.e. pdb, ipdb, or PyCharm’s debugger). Usually this is becuase you’re running code in a way where you don’t have ready access to the process’s standard in/out. Examples of this include:

celery tasks
local testing/debugging using uWSGI

One way to debug code running in these kinds of enviornments is to use the PyCharm remote debugger. Follow the JetBrains documentation for creating a new run configuration for the remote debugger: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/help/remote-debugging.html. At some point you may be required to add pycharm-debug.egg to your system’s PYTHONPATH. The easist way to do this is to modify your ~/.bash_profile to automatically append this module to the python path. This looks like:

export PYTHONPATH="$PYTHONPATH:<your_path_to>/pycharm-debug.egg"

To apply these changes to the current bash session, simply

source ~/.bash_profile

When you start the remote debug server in PyCharm you will get some console output like:

Use the following code to connect to the debugger:
import pydevd
pydevd.settrace('localhost', port=54735, stdoutToServer=True, stderrToServer=True)

So to use, simple copy paste the bottom two lines wherever you need to run a debugger. In celery tasks for example, this often means inside a task definition where it would be otherwise impossible to step into the code. Trigger whatever is needed to queue the celery task, and watch the PyCharm console to see when a new connection is initiated.

Happy remote-debugging.