Table Of Contents

• Serving WSGI Applications
  • Virtual Hosts

Serving WSGI Applications

There are many ways to serve a WSGI application. While you’re developing it, you usually don’t want to have a full-blown webserver like Apache up and running, but instead a simple standalone one. Because of that Werkzeug comes with a builtin development server.

The easiest way is creating a small start-myproject.py file that runs the application using the builtin server:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from werkzeug import run_simple
from myproject import make_app

app = make_app(...)
run_simple('localhost', 8080, app, use_reloader=True)

You can also pass it the extra_files keyword argument with a list of additional files (like configuration files) you want to observe.

werkzeug.run_simple(hostname, port, application, use_reloader=False, use_debugger=False, use_evalex=True, extra_files=None, reloader_interval=1, threaded=False, processes=1, static_files=None)

Start an application using wsgiref and with an optional reloader. This wraps wsgiref to fix the wrong default reporting of the multithreaded WSGI variable and adds optional multithreading and fork support.

Changed in version 0.5: Older versions of this function supported replacing the default request handler with a custom wsgiref request handler. As we are no longer using wsgiref internally that parameter went away.

New in version 0.5: static_files was added to simplify serving of static files.

Parameters:

• hostname – The host for the application. eg: 'localhost'
• port – The port for the server. eg: 8080
• application – the WSGI application to execute
• use_reloader – should the server automatically restart the python process if modules were changed?
• use_debugger – should the werkzeug debugging system be used?
• use_evalex – should the exception evaluation feature be enabled?
• extra_files – a list of files the reloader should listen for additionally to the modules. For example configuration files.
• reloader_interval – the interval for the reloader in seconds.
• threaded – should the process handle each request in a separate thread?
• processes – number of processes to spawn.
• static_files – a dict of paths for static files. This works exactly like SharedDataMiddleware, it’s actually just wrapping the application in that middleware before serving.

Information

The development server is not intended to be used on production systems. It was designed especially for development purposes and performs poorly under high load. For deployment setups have a look at the Application Deployment pages.

Virtual Hosts

Many web applications utilize multiple subdomains. This can be a bit tricky to simulate locally. Fortunately there is the hosts file that can be used to assign the local computer multiple names.

This allows you to call your local computer yourapplication.local and api.yourapplication.local (or anything else) in addition to localhost.

You can find the hosts file on the following location:

Windows	%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Linux / OS X	/etc/hosts

You can open the file with your favorite text editor and add a new name after localhost:

127.0.0.1       localhost yourapplication.local api.yourapplication.local

Save the changes and after a while you should be able to access the development server on these host names as well. You can use the URL Routing system to dispatch between different hosts or parse request.host yourself.