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Frustrated with mod_python: is there any complete documentation out there?

7 points by ingenium ↗ HN
It me an hour to figure out that to not get 404 errors, you have to make the primary function called index. Now I'm trying to pass a variable in the URL and retrieve it. This is simple in PHP, and in Python I would think it would just be a dictionary.

The official documentation from mod_python is virtually useless. Even a list of classes and functions and how they work would be great.

6 comments

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thingsilearned
Hi Josh.

Try Django? I think you'll be much happier.

micktwomey
I think most people don't use mod_python directly, but instead use it as a means of running their web framework. So, for example, django comes with support for mod_python (http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/modpython/).

mod_wsgi (http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/) is rapidly becoming popular, it's an implementation of the python wsgi spec which has a plethora of toolkits and libraries available.

If you want to go low level I'd recommend mod_wsgi + a library like webob. Otherwise I recommend django on top of mod_python (or mod_wsgi).

ra
+1 Great advice.
briansmith
I can also recommend mod_wsgi in daemon mode. The developer (Graham Dumpleton) is really great about supporting it on its mailing list.
simonw
Oddly enough Django was actually originally written as an easy abstraction layer around mod_python - partly so we didn't have to work with the low-leveal mod_python constructs, but mostly because back in 2003 we weren't 100% sure mod_python would work for us, and having an abstraction layer would make it easy to move to something else if we needed to (this was before WSGI as well).
inklesspen
I suggest writing a WSGI app. Then you can deploy it in a variety of ways, one of which is mod_python. Another method, as others mentioned, is mod_wsgi, and the best method in my experience is mod_proxy reverse-proxying to paste.httpserver.