CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythontornadowsgicherrypy
marcin_koss
marcin_koss

Reputation: 5882

How to setup WSGI server to run similarly to Apache?

I'm coming from PHP/Apache world where running an application is super easy. Whenever PHP application crashes Apache process running that request will stop but server will be still ruining happily and respond to other clients. Is there a way to have Python application work in a smilar way. How would I setup wsgi server like Tornado or CherryPy so it will work similarly? also, how would I run several applications from one server with different domains?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 313

Answers (2)

Graham Dumpleton
Graham Dumpleton

Reputation: 58563

What you are after would possibly happen anyway for WSGI severs. This is because any Python exception only affects the current request and the framework or WSGI server would catch the exception, log it and translate it to a HTTP 500 status page. The application would still be in memory and would continue to handle future requests.

What we get down to is what exactly you mean by 'crashes Apache process'.

It would be rare for your code to crash, as in cause the process to completely exit due to a core dump, the whole process. So are you being confused in your terminology in equating an application language level error to a full process crash.

Even if you did find a way to crash a process, Apache/mod_wsgi handles that okay and the process will be replaced. The Gunicorn WSGI server will also do that. CherryPy will not unless you have a process manager running which monitors it and the process monitor restarts it. Tornado in its single process mode will have the same problem. Using Tornado as the worker in Gunicorn is one way around that plus I believe Tornado itself may have some process manager in it now for running multiple process which allow it to restart processes if they die.

Do note that if your application bug which caused the Python exception is bad enough and it corrupts state within the process, subsequent requests may possibly have issues. This is the one difference with PHP. With PHP, after any request, whether successful or not, the application is effectively thrown away and doesn't persist. So buggy code cannot affect subsequent requests. In Python, because the process with loaded code and retained state is kept between requests, then technically you could get things in a state where you would have to restart the process to fix it. I don't know of any WSGI server though that has a mechanism to automatically restart a process if one request returned an error response.

Upvotes: 3

mgibsonbr
mgibsonbr

Reputation: 22007

If you're in an UNIX-like environment, you can run mod_wsgi under Apache in Daemon Mode. This means there will be a separate process for the Python code, and even if it crashes the server will continue running normally (and hopefully the WSGI process will restart itself). A WSGI application can run under multiple processes and multiple threads per process.

As for running multiple domains in the same server, check Name-Based Virtual Hosts.

Upvotes: 1

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