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hobs
Good use of lens flare.
toyg
Excuse my French, but... if this hadn't been written by an internet celeb, nobody would have given two shits about it.
zedshaw
Pretty much.

Oh, except, there's actually an interesting idea in there if you look really closely.

nostrademons
Isn't the interesting idea basically CGI?
zedshaw
If you can abstract everything to be anything then nothing has meaning.
GabrielMtn
Lovely bit o' philosophy there. no sarcasm
jamesaguilar
Depending on how much you want to reduce it, you can dismiss almost anything having to do with a webserver this way. Some more powerful versions that dismiss any and all computer related ideas that have output:

    - But isn't that just calling a bunch of syscalls?
    - But isn't that just moving a bunch of bytes around?
nostrademons
Well, yes, but I picked CGI for a reason. Zed says in one of the other comments that the inspiration for this was "What if PHP got it right?" PHP came out of a long tradition of CGI apps, as a way to make templating dead-simple and still provide a bunch of programming language tools.

The brilliant idea behind CGI is that you set a directory as your cgi-bin, drop an executable file, and then the webserver will run that executable and pass in a bunch of data from the request as environment variables and on STDIN, and then send STDOUT back to the browser. It's an incredibly powerful idea with a really simple implementation. You can write your scripts in any language, they can do anything, they can present further abstractions and run other scripts, they can embed other languages like Python or PHP or Haskell, and they can embed other frameworks like Django or Rails. And all you have to do is drop a file in a directory and make it executable. All because of the power of plain text: CGI "speaks" a uniform interface that any computer language can understand.

When I saw FuqIt, I thought of CGI because the brilliant idea behind FuqIt seems to be "Drop a Python file or Jinja template in a directory, and we'll call it via a uniform interface". Kinda like CGI, huh, except it's restricted to Python? (Actually, there's another standard - WSGI - that's built around the same principles as CGI but restricted to Python.)

nelmaven
This is the best explanation of CGI I've encountered so far.
invisible
But you were downplaying the project because it is "basically CGI" (inaccurate already). In context I think you'll find you were being hostile about the matter.

Anyway, it is the start of an idea with a proclaimed possible direction (basic error handling, basic web server functionality). It doesn't do a lot right now (and maybe it never will) but it isn't just CGI.

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pdevr
More than one, probably?

  base, ext = os.path.splitext(name[1:])
zedshaw
If that code is an idea, then the idea is "HACK AWAY!"
vph
I think you can run python modules installed in the system through this framework.
zedshaw
Yup, and expose any file on the file system.
ch0wn
The thing with internet celebs in the programming community is that they mostly are celebrities for a reason and not just because they are the pretty daughter of some billionaire.
oriste
Zed is not the pretty daughter of a billionaire?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
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zedshaw
Yep, works pretty well actually, but not secure yet. It's a hack to test out the idea.
recuter
You're my favorite. :)

Didn't you do a lua microframework? I'm more intrigued by that one but whatever gets your creative juices flowing, godspeed.

zedshaw
Well must be a slow news day today so I'll say a few things about FuqIt for the high-minded HN crowd:

1. Don't run this at all in anyway that someone can access it. It's ultra hackable. Extra points if people can point out why.

2. I basically am just goofing off. The idea though is this thought: "What if PHP got it right?"

3. There's some little tricks in there you may not have seen before. Take a look at the code if you're new to Python.

4. If I get around to it I may write a web server for this using my various web-server-maker chops and put in some of the Lamson code and then make it talk to ZeroMQ off of a URL similar to how it's doing jinja and python so it can be a full service web+email+messaging system configured off just files in a directory and then probably I'll get bored and do something else.

Enjoy!

zeroecco
Spend more time on LRTHW. I need more lessons to get better!! (kidding)
hartror
I've seen something similar done with the Mako templating library which allows mixing html and Python. We jokingly dubbed it PHPython, and it had grown into horrible spaghetti.

I think what happened was it started out as a quick and dirty thing that just grew and grew.

whimsy
Just like most PHP projects.
rdtsc
Hey Zed that's pretty cool.

I think this was submitted with a back-thought of possibly generating ridicule. It doesn't matter, anyone coding and playing with shit like this gets upvotes from me.

I also like web.py (the framework conceived and built by Aaron Swartz) for some of the same reasons -- simplicity and cleanliness. Start with something like "let's see how would a clean and simple web framework look like in Python." That's beautiful I think. Yeah I know it hasn't exactly taken off and flask and friends surpassed it but I still like it.

EDIT: corrected Aaraon Swartz's name (thanks bensw)

bensw
s/Schwarz/Swartz
vph
>That's beautiful I think. Yeah I know it hasn't exactly taken off and flask and friends surpassed it but I still like it.

That reason it still hasn't taken off is that Aaron is very like Zed; they are grasshoppers. They get bored easily from doing something.

toyg
:s/is/was/

:(

kibibu
I'm going to assume the "ultra hackable" is thanks to requesting '../../phpmyadmin/config.php' or whatever.

Oddly enough, I can't easily see any way to load a random (system-level) python module, thanks to including the 'app' package explicitly in the load_module - IIRC you can't resolve imports outside a top-level package.

davenull
This looks cool. BTW, thanks for helping me not feel like a total moron while learning Python, the hard way was the right way.
benhsu
how the fuck is this the top link on HN right now?
zedshaw
It's almost like I'm famous and people are interested in what I do!
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hayksaakian
I've never heard of you, but I liked the idea behind a PHP replacement.
Demiurge
In my experience with a new PHP developers, the first hurdle is explaining that urls have nothing to do with the filesystem.
hayksaakian
(I don't do PHP) I had the same issue starting with using web APIs in java.

It's understandable though as the early web was essentially serving a filesystem directly (almost ftp).

andrewflnr
That aside, I've always been interested in the, as you put it, "shit files into a directory" approach with a language that's not PHP. Now if only we could get ubiquitous hosting for it once you work out the security issues (which I do hope you'll do)...
gojomo
There's a niche for something that's as sloppy-easy-to-get-started as PHP, but with a more concise/consistent/powerful language. Perhaps, a "PYP" - Python with PHP characteristics.

This is a little like that.

zedshaw
Yay! Someone gets it!
jhancock
I've been thinking along these lines for a while. For python-based, I think your toolkit is a good stake in the ground.

I think Lua-based is very interesting. openresty is a great choice for replacing the simple glory of what Apache/PHP once was.

Although, Lapis (moonscript/Lua) adopts "Web-MVC", the way its coded is a toolkit of un-opinionated libs. You can skip the MVC stuff and just have a clean set of libs for throwing things in a directory and getting your bang for very few bucks.

http://leafo.net/lapis/ http://moonscript.org/ http://openresty.org/

mappu
Something like Python Server Pages? Maybe check out Spyce or mod_python (or maybe set *.py to run as CGI)
toyg
Just serve .py as CGI. Hardly the stuff of legend.
gunn
I did one of these! The RHP Hypertext Preprocessor - https://github.com/gunn/RHP

Someone asked on stackoverflow why PHP is so easy to learn, so I wondered how much learning curve we could cut away. Drop .erb and .haml files in a dir. Done.

synparb
I feel like http://aspen.io/ sort of does something like this already. Written in Python and just uses the filesystem to generate content rather than a MVC.
jamwt
Yes, I really feel like aspen is exactly this, and very well done too. Already has real-world things running on it, like http://gittip.com .
Demiurge
Brilliant. I am supercharging it with dilithium crystals and replacing all my production Django sites right this second.
zedshaw
Let me know where they are so I can steal your password files with my uber secure file resolution code.
Demiurge
They are actually inside the NSA ring 0, vacuum isolated, prisming zetabytes of privates emails and facebook lolkatz.
zokier
> FuqIt is Copyright (C) Zed A. Shaw All Rights Reserved.

[emphasis mine]

That's an interesting approach. I take that Zed doesn't want this to be actually used anywhere?

zedshaw
Yep, it's not safe to use, so nobody should use it. Edit: I should add, not yet anyway.
dave84
This is one of those things that becomes immediately "obvious" the moment I see it... but I'd never have thought of.

If we could decrease the amount of understanding required (possibly a bad thing) to get python running on the server it would be great.

Why can't I just go "python app.py -port 80" and call it a day? What would we need to get to that point?

krapp
What would we need to get to that point?

To be using PHP.

(runs away)

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Jach
This has too much functionality. Sometimes I just want to statically serve all the files in a directory and its subdirectories.

    cd not_my_porn_folder
    python -m SimpleHTTPServer
revskill
The first version now is minimalistic. But to be a second Ruby on Rails framework, your system will get more complicated soon. Good luck.
zedshaw
You obviously know nothing of my work.
SkyMarshal
Didn't you know, any sufficiently complicated Python framework contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Ruby on Rails.
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d0m
Just wanted to say a special mention to the knife_or_banana method:

    def do_GET(self):
            try:
                self.knife_or_banana(self.path)
          [...]

    def knife_or_banana(self, path):
            # THIS AIN'T THAT SECURE, BUT FUQIT
             root, ext = os.path.splitext(path)

          [...]
rman666
Would fans of FuqIt be "Fuqers"?
brooksbp
Why is this front page? Because he is a celebrity? If Python is the drug of choice, Flask. K? Thx, now get off my news feed.
[dead] brooksbp
Why is this front page? Because he is a celebrity? If Python is the drug of choice, Flask. K? Thx, now get off my news feed.
reebalazs
Hi Zed,

you nailed the name just right, but a single look at the mascot made me blind for an hour.

And it's already ported to NodeJS, congrats!

hoodoof
Anything by Zed Shaw is interesting. One of the real software engineers. Or should I say "Programmers, Motherf..."
abootstrapper
Juvenile. If this had any other name or was written by anyone else, no one would give a fuq.