Aspen

A Python web framework that makes the most of the filesystem.
Simplates are the main attraction.

Deployment

Aspen is a WSGI application, located at aspen.wsgi.website. That’s an instance of aspen.website.Website, configured only from the environment. If you need more control, you can instantiate that class yourself. In any case, here are some ways to get it on the network.

Aspen

Aspen bundles its own server, called aspen. It is suitable for production.

$ cd /path/to/my/website
$ aspen
Greetings, program! Welcome to port 8080.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a preforking server ported from Ruby.

$ cd /path/to/my/website
$ gunicorn aspen.wsgi:website
2011-05-17 17:07:53 [40170] [INFO] Starting gunicorn 0.12.1
2011-05-17 17:07:53 [40170] [INFO] Listening at: http://127.0.0.1:8000 (40170)
2011-05-17 17:07:53 [40170] [INFO] Using worker: sync
2011-05-17 17:07:53 [40171] [INFO] Booting worker with pid: 40171

Spawning

Spawning is a preforking and/or prethreading server that supports graceful code reloading.

$ cd /path/to/my/website
$ spawning aspen.wsgi.website
(40266) *** Controller starting at Tue May 17 17:27:34 2011
Should start 4 new children
(40270) wsgi starting up on http://0.0.0.0:8080/
(40267) wsgi starting up on http://0.0.0.0:8080/
(40268) wsgi starting up on http://0.0.0.0:8080/
(40269) wsgi starting up on http://0.0.0.0:8080/

Apache mod_fastcgi

To get this to work you'll need: An .htaccess file (or other appropriate apache config file) that includes:

<Files myfcgi>
  SetHandler fastcgi-script
</Files>

and then myfcgi is a script that looks like:

#!/bin/bash
INSTDIR=/path/to/my/aspen/project
export ASPEN_PROJECT_ROOT=$INSTDIR/src
export ASPEN_WWW_ROOT=$INSTDIR/www

source $INSTDIR/bin/activate
$INSTDIR/bin/fcgi_aspen "$@"

Notes:

fcgi_aspen requires that you have the flup package installed in your virtualenv.
The ASPEN_PROJECT_ROOT and ASPEN_WWW_ROOT dirs are of course relatively arbitrarily named - I just picked obvious ones.
There's a bit of an issue if someone hits the node without a trailing slash: in this case aspen gets the full path from root to the script, instead of just the extra path supplied 'under' the script. Dealing with this is up to the reader.

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