System-wide Django package overrides virtualenv in mod_wsgi - django

Question

I'm trying to deploy my Django app on mod_wsgi 3.3 (Ubuntu 12.04). It doesn't work only because the (older) system-wide version of Django interferes and overrides the one installed in virtualenv. I've checked that uninstalling the system-wide version fixes this, but I want to have both.
Here's my configuration:
/home/user/project/wsgi.py
import os
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "settings")
from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
application = get_wsgi_application()
/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/project
WSGIScriptAlias /project /home/user/project/wsgi.py
WSGIDaemonProcess project python-path=/home/user/project:/home/user/venv/lib/python2.7/site-packages
WSGIProcessGroup project
<Directory /home/user/project>
<Files wsgi.py>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Files>
</Directory>
Here's what I see in /var/log/apache2/error.log:
[Fri Aug 01 16:02:09 2014] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] File "/home/user/project/wsgi.py", line 30, in <module>
[Fri Aug 01 16:02:09 2014] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
[Fri Aug 01 16:02:09 2014] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] ImportError: No module named wsgi
This is because the global version is 1.3, which doesn't have django.core.wsgi.
The virtualenv version is 1.7. Under virtualenv, Python imports the correct Django version.

Answer 1

You're not activating your virtualenv inside the wsgi file, so Python knows nothing about it.

Answer 2

With the version of mod_wsgi you are using, you could have just said:
WSGIDaemonProcess project python-home=/home/user/venv python-path=/home/user/project
That is, use python-home option to WSGIDaemonProcess to specify the sys.prefix value of the Python virtual environment.
No need to fiddle with sys.path in the WSGI script file.