I would like to know what is the fastest way to turn a simple Python script into a basic web app.
For example, say I would like to create a web app that takes a keyword from the user and display the most retweeted tweet on Twitter. If I write a python script that is capable of performing that task using Twitter's API, how would I go about turning it into a web app for people to access?
I have looked at frameworks such as Django, but it would take me weeks or months to learn how to use it. I just need something quick and simple. Any such alternatives?
Make a CGI script out of it. You basically get the request information from the webserver via environment variables and you print the desired HTML to stdout. There are helper libraries such as Werkzeug which help with abstracting away the handling of the environment variables by wrapping them in a Request object.
This technique is quite outdated and isn't normally used nowadays as the script has to be run on every request and thus incurs the startup cost all the time.
Nevertheless this may actually be a good solution for you because it is quick and every webserver supports it.
Related
Background: Am comfortable in Python, know nothing about web deployment. I am looking into it as an alternative to compiling into .exe or .app for Win or Mac distributions.
Issue: I have a simple application that uses BeautifulSoup, openpyxl, and PySimplyGUI. It interacts with some local excel-files and creates new ones. I want to be able to, using minimum effort, make it accessible on my own web page or something similar, and make the created excel-files available for browsing/download. I have no idea how to do any of this. I've been looking into Flask and cloud foundry, but it feels like there should be some easy alternative that I'm missing. Ideally I would want a page where someone can log in (given a username and password I supply), which then directs to a page where the user can interact with my application.
Request: Is there a relatively easy way to do this that doesn't involve setting up a lot of stuff in html, etc., and where excel-files can still be interacted with by openpyxl? I ideally would just want some template, where I can "fill in the blanks" for the python method I would want to execute for each button!
Hope this makes sense. Thanks in advance :)
The easiest way to create a web app with a simple interface yet effective which does not require frontend programming is Streamlit. It is primarily used by data scientist to create simple web apps quickly.
I have an idea for a web app and plan to learn Python as I go (right now I know html/css, some javascript, some php and sql). The app would be able to manipulate and analyze audio files, among other things.
Ideally, I'd like to make the app available through my wordpress site so that I can take advantage of WordPress's login management and the plugin s2member's subscription management and content restriction capabilities.
Is that possible? Would it even make sense?
If not, is there a better alternative to automate all of that (the subscription management, logins, payment processing, content restriction, etc) without having to code it myself?
I suggest you develop a REST API in Python and extend your Wordpress site to consume that API.
For the Python side, you could go with Flask and use Flask-RESTful.
For the Wordpress side, have a look at this question.
Sure, if you meet a couple of conditions:
The server your wordpress site is on also has python
And you have the ability run arbitrary python scripts on said server.
Here's a (very contrived) example of how to do it from a plugin:
call-python.php (plugin file):
<php
/*
Plugin name: Call Python
Author:..
....
*/
$pyScript = "/path/to/app.py";
exec("/usr/bin/python $pyScript", $output);
var_dump($output);
And the python script app.py:
print("Hello, World")
And that's it! That will dump Hello, world to the body. Obviously you'll need a bit more for a more complicated python app, but it will work.
Like others are saying, there may be better "more correct" ways of doing it. But if your end goal is to run a python app from WordPress it's possible.
I want to be able to give out a form, with essentially 4 inputs. Each time it is submitted, I would it to trigger a python script.
I'm not totally sure where to start here. I could have the python code live on a server somewhere and have the google apps script trigger it, but ideally I could do this without having to host my code somewhere else. I also would like to avoid paying for anything...
Any and all advice would be appreciated. Please assume I have only a small amount of knowledge about this kind of stuff.
Check out this tutorial on the AppEngine documentation.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstartedpython27/introduction
It will help you set up using Python and WebApp2 (for your forms!) and storing this data to datastore if you wish. You could just expand and modify the guestbook tutorial they make you do to have your application/script do exactly what you need it to. It's an excellent tutorial to get started even if you don't have much knowledge about python or appengine.
I know that with the SimpleHTTPServer I can make my directories accessible by web-browsers via Internet. So, I run just one line of the code and, as a result, another person working on another computer can use his/her browser to see content of my directories.
But I wander if I can make more complicated things. For example, somebody uses his/her browser to load my Python program with a set of parameter (example.py?x=2&y=2) and, as a result, he/she sees the HTML page generated by the Python program (not the Python program).
I also wander if I can process html form submitted to the SimpleHTTPServer.
While it is possible, you have to do pretty much everything yourself (parsing request parameters, handle routing, etc).
If you are not looking to get experience in creating web-frameworks, but just want to create a small site you should probably use a minimalistic framework instead.
Try Bottle, a simple single-file web framework: http://bottlepy.org
Maybe the VerseMatch project and related recipes over at ActiveState is something you would be interested in examining? It implements a small application using the standard library for dynamic running.
have you considered using CGIHTTPServer instead of SimpleHTTPServer? Then you can toss your scripts in cgi-bin and they'll execute. You have to include content-type header and whatnot but if you're looking for quick and dirty it's real convenient
I'm just starting out with Python and have practiced so far in the IDLE interface. Now I'd like to configure Python with MAMP so I can start creating really basic webapps — using Python inside HTML, or well, vice-versa. (I'm assuming HTML is allowed in Python, just like PHP? If not, are there any modules/template engines for that?)
What modules do I need to install to run .py from my localhost? Googling a bit, it seems there're various methods — mod_python, FastCGI etc.. which one should I use and how to install it with MAMP Pro 1.8.2?
Many thanks
I think probably the easiest way for you to get started is to work with something like Django. It's a top-to-bottom web development stack which provides you with everything you need to develop and run a backend server. Things can be very simple in that world, no need to mess around with mod_python or FastCGI unless you really have the need.
It's also nice because it conforms to WSGI, which is a Python standard which allows you to plug together unrelated bits of reusable code to add specific functionality to your web app when needed (say for example on-the-fly gzip compression, or OpenID authentication). Once you have outgrown the default Django stack, or want to change something specific you can go down this road if you want.
Those are a few pointers to get you started. You could also look at other alternative frameworks such as TurboGears or paste if you wanted but Django is a great way to get something up and running quickly. Anyway, I'm sure you'll enjoy the experience: WSGI makes it a real joy knocking up web apps with the wealth of Python code you'll find on the web.
[edit: you may find it helpful to browse some of the may Django related questions here on stack-overflow if you run into problems]
You asked whether HTML is allowed within Python, which indicates that you still think too much in PHP terms about it. Contrary to PHP, Python was not designed to create dynamic web-pages. Instead, it was designed as a stand-alone, general-purpose programming language. Therefore you will not be able to put HTML into Python. There are some templating libraries which allow you to go the other way around, somewhat, but that's a completely different issue.
With things like Django or TurboGears or all the other web-frameworks, you essentially set up a small, stand-alone web-server (which comes bundled with the framework so you don't have to do anything), tell the server which function should handle what URL and then write those functions. In the simplest case, each URL you specify has its own function.
That 'handler function' (or 'view function' in Django terminology) receives a request object in which interesting info about the just-received request is contained. It then does whatever processing is required (a DB query for example). Finally, it produces some output, which is returned to the client. A typical way to get the output is to have some data passed to a template where it is rendered together with some HTML.
So, the HTML is separated in a template (in the typical case) and is not in the Python code.
About Python 3: I think you will find that the vast majority of all Python development going on in the world is still with Python 2.*. As others have pointed out here, Python 3 is just coming out, most of the good stuff is not available for it yet, and you shouldn't be bothered about that.
My advise: Grab yourself Python 2.6 and Django 1.1 and dive in. It's fun.
Django is definitely not the easiest way.
check out pylons. http://pylonshq.com/
also check sqlalchemy for sql related stuff. Very cool library.
On the other hand, you can always start with something very simple like mako for templating. http://www.makotemplates.org/