Deploying a WSGI app with Python Paste

As part of my research of the current state of WSGI for my paper for OSDC2005 I revisited PythonPaste. Ian has added lots more functionality since I last looked and I wanted to use Python Paste as the "glue" for a demo of creating a web app from WSGI middleware components. As with most stuff Ian does, there was enough documentation to get me going or so I thought. In reality, it took me a lot longer to get things working than I originally planned. This is no reflection on Ian's docs, but more on me not "getting it", and trying to make the solution complex. So what follows is a little tutorial on how to deploy a very simple WSGI app using Paste.Deploy and Paste.Script under Ubuntu 5.10 Linux and Python 2.4. Also this tutorial only uses a very small subset of Paste functionality.

0. If you have not installed any Python packages using easy_install before, you will need to download it and install it following the instructions at this site.

1. Install paste, paste.deploy and paste.script using easy install

sudo easy_install http://cheeseshop.python.org/packages/2.4/P/Paste/Paste-0.3-py2.4.egg
sudo easy_install http://cheeseshop.python.org/packages/2.4/P/PasteDeploy/PasteDeploy-0.3-py2.4.egg
sudo easy_install http://cheeseshop.python.org/packages/2.4/P/PasteScript/PasteScript-0.3-py2.4.egg

Also install WSGIUtils so we have a WSGI server to run our WSGI app under.

sudo easy_install http://pylons.groovie.org/files/WSGIUtils-0.6-py2.4.egg

2. Create a simple WSGI app in a file called hello_wsgi.py

def application(environ, start_response):
    """Simple WSGI application"""
    status = '200 OK'
    response_headers = [('Content-type','text/plain')]
    start_response(status, response_headers)
    return ['Hello world!\n']

def app_factory(global_config, **local_config):
    """This function wraps our simple WSGI app so it
    can be used with paste.deploy"""
    return application

3. Create a paste deploy configuration file called config.ini

[app:main]
paste.app_factory = hello_wsgi:app_factory

[server:main]
use = egg:PasteScript#wsgiutils
host = localhost
port = 80

The first section app:main is where we define our application, or more simply tell paste.deploy where the code for our WSGI app can be found, in our case in the file hello_wsgi.py and by calling function app_factory.

The second section server:main tells paste.script what WSGI server to use. In this case we will be using the simple WSGI server that comes with WSGIUtils.

4. To serve the app we use the paster script that was installed as part of Paste.Script. So enter the following at the commandline.

export PYTHONPATH=.   # Ensure our hello_wsgi.py module can be imported by Python
sudo paster server ./config.ini

On the console, a message will be displayed similar to:

Starting server in PID 9582.

5. Enter the URL for the web app in a browser and hopefully you see hello world displayed.

6. Replace the boring hello world app with a more useful WSGI app you are now inspired to create.