I need to set up an Apache instance on a windows box we have. I'm running a Python/Django application, and mod_wsgi is preferable so that I can restart individual applications. I do, however, need to run it under Windows. Apache just doesn't seem made to be easy to administer in Windows (last time I tried updating a Windows instance, I had to completely uninstall and reinstall it).
Are there any tools to simplify this? Or is there any way to get what I want to do out of IIS or another web server?
The daemon mode of Apache/mod_wsgi is not, and will not ever be, supported on Windows. Thus you are stuck with running all your WSGI applications in embedded mode, segregated by running them in different sub interpreters of the one process. This use of separate sub interpreters is the default for a mounted WSGI application and so you don't need to do anything special. This arrangement will not allow you to restart individual WSGI applications. Your only choice is to restart the whole Apache server to pick up changes.
Although semi automatic process reloading on changes is normally only an option with daemon mode, there is a back door method of doing the same thing with embedded mode on Windows. For details of this see:
http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/ReloadingSourceCode#Restarting_Windows_Apache
Google Code hosts both mod_wsgi and isapi-wsgi. You could configure an IIS server with the ISAPI WSGI module to get functionality similar to the Apache/mod_wsgi solution.