Running Python web apps on shared ASO servers?

[Gilles]

Hello

I use A Small Orange (ASO) as my web provider. Asking the question in
their forum so far didn't work, so I figured I might have a faster
answer by asking here.

Support replied this in an old thread: "Just a CGI option. We don't
have enough users to justify adding mod_python support."
http://forums.asmallorange.com/topic/4672-python-support/page__hl__python
http://forums.asmallorange.com/topic/4918-python-fcgi-verses-mod-python/

Does it mean that ASO only supports writing Python web apps as
long-running processes (CGI, FCGI, WSGI, SCGI) instead of embedded
Python à la PHP?

If that's the case, which smallest tool would you recomment to write
basic apps, eg. handling forms, etc.?

Thank you.

 

[Dieter Maurer]

...
Support replied this in an old thread: "Just a CGI option. We don't
have enough users to justify adding mod_python support."
http://forums.asmallorange.com/topic/4672-python-support/page__hl__python
http://forums.asmallorange.com/topic/4918-python-fcgi-verses-mod-python/

Does it mean that ASO only supports writing Python web apps as
long-running processes (CGI, FCGI, WSGI, SCGI) instead of embedded
Python à la PHP?

It looks as if you could use CGI to activate Python scripts.
There seems to be no mod_python" support.

You should probably read the mentioned forum resources to learn
details about the Python support provided by your web site hoster.

 

[Gilles]

You should probably read the mentioned forum resources to learn
details about the Python support provided by your web site hoster.

Yup, but so far, no answer, so I figured someone here might now.

Those articles seem to indicate that CGI isn't a good solution when
mod_python isn't available, so it looks like I'll have to investigate
FastCGI, WSGI, etc.

http://docs.python.org/howto/webservers.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/219110/how-python-web-frameworks-wsgi-and-cgi-fit-together

Thank you.

 

[Tim Golden]

Yup, but so far, no answer, so I figured someone here might now.

Those articles seem to indicate that CGI isn't a good solution when
mod_python isn't available

Just to make a point: one person's "isn't a good solution" is another
person's "works perfectly well for me". Modern servers are really quite
quick: the cost of starting up a Python process and generating an HTML
page can be really quite low. I've certainly had low-traffic production
websites running for years on CGI without anyone complaining.

If speed was an issue or if I thought that I'd be getting more requests
than I am then I'd consider a more sophisticated solution.

TJG

 

[Gilles]

Just to make a point: one person's "isn't a good solution" is another
person's "works perfectly well for me". Modern servers are really quite
quick: the cost of starting up a Python process and generating an HTML
page can be really quite low. I've certainly had low-traffic production
websites running for years on CGI without anyone complaining.

Thanks Tim for the input. I'll try the different solutions available
and see if CGI is good enough for my needs.

 

[Gilles]

Does it mean that ASO only supports writing Python web apps as
long-running processes (CGI, FCGI, WSGI, SCGI) instead of embedded
Python à la PHP?

I need to get the big picture about the different solutions to run a
Python web application.

From what I read, it seems like this is the way things involved over
the years:

CGI : original method. Slow because the server has to spawn a new
process to run the interpreter + script every time a script is run.

mod_python : Apache module alternative to CGI. The interpreter is
loaded once, and running a script means just handling the script

mod_wsgi : mod_python is no longer developped, and mod_wsgi is its new
reincarnation

FastCGI and SCGI: Faster alternativees to CGI; Run as independent
programs, and communicate with the web server through either a Unix
socket (located on the same host) or a TCP socket (remote host)

Is this correct?

Thank you.

 

[Emile van Sebille]

On 8/16/2012 7:01 AM Gilles said...

I need to get the big picture about the different solutions to run a
Python web application.

the years:

CGI : original method. Slow because the server has to spawn a new
process to run the interpreter + script every time a script is run.

mod_python : Apache module alternative to CGI. The interpreter is
loaded once, and running a script means just handling the script

mod_wsgi : mod_python is no longer developped, and mod_wsgi is its new
reincarnation

FastCGI and SCGI: Faster alternativees to CGI; Run as independent
programs, and communicate with the web server through either a Unix
socket (located on the same host) or a TCP socket (remote host)

Is this correct?

Thank you.

I'm sure there's no single correct answer to this.

Consider (python 2.6]:

emile@paj39:~$ mkdir web
emile@paj39:~$ cd web
emile@paj39:~/web$ cat > test.html
hello from test.html
emile@paj39:~/web$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Then browse to localhost:8000/test.html

Emile