docs/serving.rst
.. module:: werkzeug.serving
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::
from werkzeug.serving 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.
.. autofunction:: run_simple
.. autofunction:: is_running_from_reloader
.. autofunction:: make_ssl_devcert
.. admonition:: 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
:doc:/deployment/index pages.
.. _reloader:
.. versionchanged:: 0.10
The Werkzeug reloader constantly monitors modules and paths of your web application, and restarts the server if any of the observed files change.
Since version 0.10, there are two backends the reloader supports: stat and
watchdog.
The default stat backend simply checks the mtime of all files in a
regular interval. This is sufficient for most cases, however, it is known to
drain a laptop's battery.
The watchdog backend uses filesystem events, and is much faster than
stat. It requires the watchdog <https://pypi.org/project/watchdog/>_
module to be installed. The recommended way to achieve this is to add
Werkzeug[watchdog] to your requirements file.
If watchdog is installed and available it will automatically be used
instead of the builtin stat reloader.
To switch between the backends you can use the reloader_type parameter of the
:func:run_simple function. 'stat' sets it to the default stat based
polling and 'watchdog' forces it to the watchdog backend.
.. note::
Some edge cases, like modules that failed to import correctly, are not
handled by the stat reloader for performance reasons. The watchdog reloader
monitors such files too.
The development server highlights the request logs in different colors
based on the status code. On Windows, Colorama_ must be installed as
well to enable this.
.. _Colorama: https://pypi.org/project/colorama/
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
:doc:/routing system to dispatch between different hosts or parse
:attr:request.host yourself.
In some cases it can be useful to shut down a server after handling a request. For example, a local command line tool that needs OAuth authentication could temporarily start a server to listen for a response, record the user's token, then stop the server.
One method to do this could be to start a server in a
:mod:multiprocessing process, then terminate the process after a value
is passed back to the parent.
.. code-block:: python
import multiprocessing
from werkzeug import Request, Response, run_simple
def get_token(q: multiprocessing.Queue) -> None:
@Request.application
def app(request: Request) -> Response:
q.put(request.args["token"])
return Response("", 204)
run_simple("localhost", 5000, app)
if __name__ == "__main__":
q = multiprocessing.Queue()
p = multiprocessing.Process(target=get_token, args=(q,))
p.start()
print("waiting")
token = q.get(block=True)
p.terminate()
print(token)
That example uses Werkzeug's development server, but any production
server that can be started as a Python process could use the same
technique and should be preferred for security. Another method could be
to start a :mod:subprocess process and send the value back over
stdout.
On operating systems that support ipv6 and have it configured such as modern Linux systems, OS X 10.4 or higher as well as Windows Vista some browsers can be painfully slow if accessing your local server. The reason for this is that sometimes "localhost" is configured to be available on both ipv4 and ipv6 sockets and some browsers will try to access ipv6 first and then ipv4.
At the current time the integrated webserver does not support ipv6 and ipv4 at the same time and for better portability ipv4 is the default.
If you notice that the web browser takes ages to load the page there are two ways
around this issue. If you don't need ipv6 support you can disable the ipv6 entry
in the hosts file_ by removing this line::
::1 localhost
Alternatively you can also disable ipv6 support in your browser. For example
if Firefox shows this behavior you can disable it by going to about:config
and disabling the network.dns.disableIPv6 key. This however is not
recommended as of Werkzeug 0.6.1!
Starting with Werkzeug 0.6.1, the server will now switch between ipv4 and
ipv6 based on your operating system's configuration. This means if that
you disabled ipv6 support in your browser but your operating system is
preferring ipv6, you will be unable to connect to your server. In that
situation, you can either remove the localhost entry for ::1 or
explicitly bind the hostname to an ipv4 address (127.0.0.1)
.. _hosts file: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file
.. versionadded:: 0.6
The builtin server supports SSL for testing purposes. If an SSL context is provided it will be used. That means a server can either run in HTTP or HTTPS mode, but not both.
Quickstart
The easiest way to do SSL based development with Werkzeug is by using it
to generate an SSL certificate and private key and storing that somewhere
and to then put it there. For the certificate you need to provide the
name of your server on generation or a `CN`.
1. Generate an SSL key and store it somewhere:
>>> from werkzeug.serving import make_ssl_devcert
>>> make_ssl_devcert('/path/to/the/key', host='localhost')
('/path/to/the/key.crt', '/path/to/the/key.key')
2. Now this tuple can be passed as ``ssl_context`` to the
:func:`run_simple` method::
run_simple('localhost', 4000, application,
ssl_context=('/path/to/the/key.crt',
'/path/to/the/key.key'))
You will have to acknowledge the certificate in your browser once then.
Loading Contexts by Hand
You can use a ssl.SSLContext object instead of a tuple for full
control over the TLS configuration.
.. code-block:: python
import ssl
ctx = ssl.SSLContext(ssl.PROTOCOL_TLS_SERVER)
ctx.load_cert_chain('ssl.cert', 'ssl.key')
run_simple('localhost', 4000, application, ssl_context=ctx)
.. versionchanged 0.10:: OpenSSL contexts are not supported anymore.
Generating Certificates
A key and certificate can be created in advance using the openssl tool
instead of the :func:`make_ssl_devcert`. This requires that you have
the `openssl` command installed on your system::
$ openssl genrsa 1024 > ssl.key
$ openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -sha1 -days 365 -key ssl.key > ssl.cert
Adhoc Certificates
``````````````````
The easiest way to enable SSL is to start the server in adhoc-mode. In
that case Werkzeug will generate an SSL certificate for you::
run_simple('localhost', 4000, application,
ssl_context='adhoc')
The downside of this of course is that you will have to acknowledge the
certificate each time the server is reloaded. Adhoc certificates are
discouraged because modern browsers do a bad job at supporting them for
security reasons.
This feature requires the cryptography library to be installed.
Unix Sockets
------------
The dev server can bind to a Unix socket instead of a TCP socket.
:func:`run_simple` will bind to a Unix socket if the ``hostname``
parameter starts with ``'unix://'``. ::
from werkzeug.serving import run_simple
run_simple('unix://example.sock', 0, app)