Library

CherryPy comes with a set of modules covering common tasks when building a web application such as session management, static resource service, encoding handling, or basic caching.

The Autoreload Feature

CherryPy is a long-running Python process, meaning that if we modify a Python module of the application, it will not be propagated in the existing process. Since stopping and restarting the server manually can be a tedious task, the CherryPy team has included an autoreload module that restarts the process as soon as it detects a modification to a Python module imported by the application. This feature is handled via configuration settings.

If you need the autoreload module to be enabled while in production you will set it up as below. Note the engine.autoreload_frequency option that sets the number of seconds the autoreloader engine has to wait before checking for new changes. It defaults to one second if not present.

[global]
server.environment = "production"
engine.autoreload_on = True
engine.autoreload_frequency = 5

Autoreload is not properly a module but we mention it here as it is a common feature offered by the library.

The Caching Module

Caching is an important side of any web application as it reduces the load and stress of the different servers in action—HTTP, application, and database servers. In spite of being highly correlated to the application itself, generic caching tools such as the ones provided by this module can help in achieving decent improvements in your application’s performance.

The CherryPy caching module works at the HTTP server level in the sense that it will cache the generated output to be sent to the user agent and will retrieve a cached resource based on a predefined key, which defaults to the complete URL leading to that resource. The cache is held in the server memory and is therefore lost when stopping it. Note that you can also pass your own caching class to handle the underlying process differently while keeping the same high-level interface.

The Coverage Module

When building an application it is often beneficial to understand the path taken by the application based on the input it processes. This helps to determine potential bottlenecks and also see if the application runs as expected. The coverage module provided by CherryPy does this and provides a friendly browseable output showing the lines of code executed during the run. The module is one of the few that rely on a third-party package to run.

The Encoding/Decoding Module

Publishing over the Web means dealing with the multitude of existing character encoding. To one extreme you may only publish your own content using US-ASCII without asking for readers’ feedback and to the other extreme you may release an application such as bulletin board that will handle any kind of charset. To help in this task CherryPy provides an encoding/decoding module that filters the input and output content based on server or user-agent settings.

The HTTP Module

This module offers a set of classes and functions to handle HTTP headers and entities.

For example, to parse the HTTP request line and query string:

s = 'GET /note/1 HTTP/1.1' # no query string
r = http.parse_request_line(s) # r is now ('GET', '/note/1', '',
'HTTP/1.1')
s = 'GET /note?id=1 HTTP/1.1' # query string is id=1
r = http.parse_request_line(s) # r is now ('GET', '/note', 'id=1',
'HTTP/1.1')
http.parseQueryString(r[2]) # returns {'id': '1'}
Provide a clean interface to HTTP headers:
For example, say you have the following Accept header value:
accept_value = "text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/
html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5"
values = http.header_elements('accept', accept_value)
print values[0].value, values[0].qvalue # will print text/html 1.0

The Httpauth Module

This module provides an implementation of the basic and digest authentication algorithm as defined in RFC 2617.

The Profiler Module

This module features an interface to conduct a performance check of the application.

The Sessions Module

The Web is built on top of a stateless protocol, HTTP, which means that requests are independent of each other. In spite of that, a user can navigate an e-commerce website with the impression that the application more or less follows the way he or she would call the store to pass an order. The session mechanism was therefore brought to the Web to allow servers to keep track of users’ information.

CherryPy’s session module offers a straightforward interface to the application developer to store, retrieve, amend, and delete chunks of data from a session object. CherryPy comes natively with three different back-end storages for session objects: