Handle the HTTP PUT method in Python WSGI - python

I currently have a bash application that, among other things, uses cURL to upload a file to a web application with the PUT method. I am attempting to duplicate the web application as the client (bash) portion is GPL but the web portion is not. I also cannot alter the client application as it auto-updates itself from the developers' website.
I have found multitudes of information on how to handle the HTTP POST method with WSGI, CherryPy, Twisted, and practically every way of having Python scripts working on the WWW. However, I can't find a single thing about the PUT method. Does anyone know how to process a PUT request with WSGI, or is there some other framework with PUT functionality that I am missing?

As I understand it, you will just want to read the stream environ['wsgi.input'], because a PUT request will send the entire contents of the PUT as the body of the request.
I am not aware of any encoding issues you will have to deal with (other than the fact that it is binary).
Some time ago, I wrote a simple set of PHP scripts to take and give huge files from another server on a LAN. We started with POST, but quickly ran out of memory on the larger files. So we switched to PUT, where the PHP script could take it's good time looping through php://input 4096 bytes at a time (or whatever)... It works great.
Here is the PHP code:
$f1 = fopen('php://input', 'rb');
$f2 = fopen($FilePath, 'wb');
while($data = fread($f1, 4096))
{
fwrite($f2, $data);
}
fclose($f1);
fclose($f2);
From my experience in handling multipart/form-data in WSGI with POST, I have little doubt that you can handle a PUT by just reading the input stream.
The python code should be like this:
output = open('/tmp/input', 'wb')
while True:
buf = environ['wsgi.input'].read(4096)
if len(buf) == 0:
break
output.write(buf)

Related

Django/Python - Serial line concurrency

I'm currently working on gateway with an embedded Linux and a Webserver. The goal of the gateway is to retrieve data from electrical devices through a RS485/Modbus line, and to display them on a server.
I'm using Nginx and Django, and the web front-end is delivered by "static" files. Repeatedly, a Javascript script file makes AJAX calls that send CGI requests to Nginx. These CGI requests are answered with JSON responses thanks to Django. The responses are mostly data that as been read on the appropriate Modbus device.
The exact path is the following :
Randomly timed CGI call -> urls.py -> ModbusCGI.py (import an other script ModbusComm.py)-> ModbusComm.py create a Modbus client and instantly try to read with it.
Next to that, I wanted to implement a Datalogger, to store data in a DB at regular intervals. I made a script that also import the ModbusComm.py script, but it doesn't work : sometime multiple Modbus frames are sent at the same time (datalogger and cgi scripts call the same function in ModbusComm.py "files" at the same time) which results in an error.
I'm sure this problem would also occur if there are a lot of users on the server (CGI requests sent at the same time). Or not ? (queue system already managed for CGI requests? I'm a bit lost)
So my goal would be to make a queue system that could handle calls from several python scripts => make them wait while it's not their turn => call a function with the right arguments when it's their turn (actually using the modbus line), and send back the response to the python script so it can generate the JSON response.
I really don't know how to achieve that, and I'm sure there are better way to do this.
If I'm not clear enough, don't hesitate to make me aware of it :)
I had the same problem when I had to allow multiple processes to read some Modbus (and not only Modbus) data through a serial port. I ended up with a standalone process (“serial port server”) that exclusively works with a serial port. All other processes work with that port through that standalone process via some inter processes communication mechanism (we used Unix sockets).
This way when an application wants to read a Modbus register it connects to the “serial port server”, sends its request and receives the response. All the actual serial port communication is done by the “serial port server” in sequential way to ensure consistency.

Socket.io POST Requests from Socket.IO-Client-Swift

I am running socket.io on an Apache server through Python Flask. We're integrating it into an iOS app (using the Socket.IO-Client-Swift library) and we're having a weird issue.
From the client side code in the app (written in Swift), I can view the actual connection log (client-side in XCode) and see the connection established from the client's IP and the requests being made. The client never receives the information back (or any information back; even when using a global event response handler) from the socket server.
I wrote a very simple test script in Javascript on an HTML page and sent requests that way and received the proper responses back. With that said, it seems to likely be an issue with iOS. I've found these articles (but none of them helped fix the problem):
https://github.com/nuclearace/Socket.IO-Client-Swift/issues/95
https://github.com/socketio/socket.io-client-swift/issues/359
My next thought is to extend the logging of socket.io to find out exact what data is being POSTed to the socket namespace. Is there a way to log exactly what data is coming into the server (bear in mind that the 'on' hook on the server side that I've set up is not getting any data; I've tried to log it from there but it doesn't appear to even get that far).
I found mod_dumpio for Linux to log all POST requests but I'm not sure how well it will play with multi-threading and a socket server.
Any ideas on how to get the exact data being posted so we can at least troubleshoot the syntax and make sure the data isn't being malformed when it's sent to the server?
Thanks!
Update
When testing locally, we got it working (it was a setting in the Swift code where the namespace wasn't being declared properly). This works fine now on localhost but we are having the exact same issues when emitting to the Apache server.
We are not using mod_wsgi (as far as I know; I'm relatively new to mod_wsgi, apologies for any ignorance). We used to have a .wsgi file that called the main app script to run but we had to change that because mod_wsgi is not compatible with Flask SocketIO (as stated in the uWSGI Web Server section here). The way I am running the script now is by using supervisord to run the .py file as a daemon (using that specifically so it will autostart in the event of a server crash).
Locally, it worked great once we installed the eventlet module through pip. When I ran pip freeze on my virtual environment on the server, eventlet was installed. I uninstalled and reinstalled it just to see if that cleared anything up and that did nothing. No other Python modules that are on my local copy seem to be something that would affect this.
One other thing to keep in mind is that in the function that initializes the app, we change the port to port 80:
socketio.run(app,host='0.0.0.0',port=80)
because we have other API functions that run through a domain that is pointing to the server in this app. I'm not sure if that would affect anything but it doesn't seem to matter on the local version.
I'm at a dead end again and am trying to find anything that could help. Thanks for your assistance!
Another Update
I'm not exactly sure what was happening yet but we went ahead and rewrote some of the code, making sure to pay extra special attention to the namespace declarations within each socket event on function. It's working fine now. As I get more details, I will post them here as I figure this will be something useful for other who have the same problem. This thread also has some really valuable information on how to go about debugging/logging these types of issues although we never actually fully figured out the answer to the original question.
I assume you have verified that Apache does get the POST requests. That should be your first test, if Apache does not log the POST requests coming from iOS, then you have a different kind of problem.
If you do get the POST requests, then you can add some custom code in the middleware used by Flask-SocketIO and print the request data forwarded by Apache's mod_wsgi. The this is in file flask_socketio/init.py. The relevant portion is this:
class _SocketIOMiddleware(socketio.Middleware):
# ...
def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
# log what you need from environ here
environ['flask.app'] = self.flask_app
return super(_SocketIOMiddleware, self).__call__(environ, start_response)
You can find out what's in environ in the WSGI specification. In particular, the body of the request is available in environ['wsgi.input'], which is a file-like object you read from.
Keep in mind that once you read the payload, this file will be consumed, so the WSGI server will not be able to read from it again. Seeking the file back to the position it was before the read may work on some WSGI implementations. A safer hack I've seen people do to avoid this problem is to read the whole payload into a buffer, then replace environ['wsgi.input'] with a brand new StringIO or BytesIO object.
Are you using flask-socketio on the server side? If you are, there is a lot of debugging available in the constructor.
socketio = SocketIO(app, async_mode=async_mode, logger=True, engineio_logger=True)

Serve dynamic data to many clients

I am writing a client-server type application. The server side gathers constantly changing data from other hardware and then needs to pass it to multiple clients (say about 10) for display. The server data gathering program will be written in Python 3.4 and run on Debian. The clients will be built with VB Winforms on .net framework 4 running on Windows.
I had the idea to run a lightweight web server on the server-side and use system.net.webclient.downloadstring calls on the client side to receive it. This is so that all the multi-threading async stuff is done for me by the web server.
Questions:
Does this seem like a good approach?
Having my data gathering program write a text file for the web server to serve seems unnecessary. Is there a way to have the data in memory and have the server just serve that so there is no disk file intermediary? Setting up a ramdisk was one solution I thought of but this seems like overkill.
How will the web server deal with the data being frequently updated, say, once a second? Do webservers deal with this elegantly or is there a chance the file will be served whilst it is being written to?
Thanks.
1) I am not very familiar with Python, but for the .net application you will likely want to push change notifications to it, rather than pull. The system.net.webclient.downloadstring is a request (pull). As I am not a Python developer I cannot assist in that.
3) As you are requesting data, it is possible to create some errors of the read/write while updating and reading at the same time. Even if this does not happen your data may be out of date as soon as you read it. This can be an acceptable problem, this just depends of how critical your data is.
This is why I would do a push notification rather than a pull. If worked correctly this can keep data synced and avoid some timing issues.

Bottle server not responding while calculating

I have a bottle server running on port 8080, using the "gevent" server. I use this server to support some simple "server sent events".
My question is probably related to not knowing exactly how my set up is working. I hope someone can take the time to elaborate on this.
All routes and serving of files from the server is working great, but I have an issue when accessing a specific route "/get_data". This gathers data from the web as well as from some internal data sources. The gathering takes about 30 minutes. While this process is running, I am not able to access any routes on the server, i.e. "/" or "/login". Once the process is finished, everything works again and the database is updated with the gathered information.
I tried replacing the gathering algorithms by a simple time.sleep(60), and while the timer was active, I was still able to access other routes just fine.
This leads to my two questions:
Why am I not able to access the server while this process is running. Is it the port that is blocked (from reading web-information), or maybe it has something to do with threading?
What would be the best way to run a demanding / long process on my server? Preferably I would like to access this from my web app, but I have thought about just putting this in a seperate python file and run this localy on the server, in a seperate instance of python. This process is run at most once per day, maybe as seldom as once per week.
This happen because WSGI handle request/response synchronously.
You can use gunicorn to run your application, it will handle multi requests and response, or you can use other methods described in bottle website:
Primer to Asynchronous Applications

Accessing http upload data before upload completion

Is there any way to access a file being uploaded over http using a CGI script before the upload finishes? For example, say a 10 megabyte file is being uploaded, and is exactly 10% done, meaning the server has 1 megabyte of data. Is it possible to read that 1 megabyte of data without waiting for the upload to finish?
My understanding of http uploads is that the server won't call the CGI script handling the upload until all of the data is received, but I'm hoping there's some way around that. I'm using python to handle CGI requests if that makes any difference.
Thanks in advance for any help.
CGI is the specification of communication between the web server and the external application. It does not allow for this.
In fact, most web servers won't do anything with an upload until it finishes, but there's no reason you couldn't write/change one (or MAYBE find one, but I don't know which it would be) to allow access, but you're still not going to do it via a CGI.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3875

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