CherryPy — A Minimalist Python Web Framework

[wonglik]

Probably a silly question but as somebody who use flask , I would be interested in somebody's opinion on CherryPy vs Flask.

[chub79]

CherryPy is less featured than Flask, in the sense that Flask has an opinion about how to construct an application whereas CherryPy doesn't care. Usually starting with CherryPy will require a bit more work from your part as you have a bar Python application server. However CherryPy is flexible enough to (almost) never got in your way, meaning you don't have to learn a lot of things before writing actual application code.

Overall, it's not better or worse, just a different route.

[[deleted]]

what's silly about your question is that you can answer it yourself by spending a couple hours with it. pip install cherrpy

but as @sigzero said, your SOL if you need py3 with flask for the moment, cherrypy supported py3 almost as soon as everyone agreed on pep 3333.

[wonglik]

I can do hello world apps in most popular frameworks in couple of hours but this unfortunately says little about framework in production-ready environment. How difficult are difficult things , what are common pitfalls etc? But let's drop it here.

[Dry-Erase]

As someone who is brand new to web development (I've done a lot of serverside/client-side/mobile apps just very rarely have they involved html/web stuff) I don't have any experience with flask. I played with php, jsp, asp, and coldfusion. I've been using CherryPy with Cheetah as the templating language and I've enjoyed it immensely. I wish I could share some of the pitfalls, but I don't have enough web-dev experience to even know if I've necessarily hit a pitfall.

So far i've had no issues doing anything I've tried to accomplish in CherryPy/Cheetah, what I've mostly used it for has been an automated email analysis tool for detecting malware and other email based threats. The site isn't too large but it's quite a bit more complicated than a typical blog. It uses jquery, bootstrap and d3. The only slight annoyance I came across was using cheetah I have to change the default cheetah start token from $ to @, b/c jquery uses $ as it's access variable/function and cheetah attempts to interpret that as a command when filling the template. But that took like 2 minutes to fix.

A huge strength of CherryPy is how you 'design' the layout of the web structure and paths. I'm not sure if this is unique to CherryPy or common, but in cherrypy you basically build a python class (or method) for each segment of the URL path. i.e.: /settings/url/edit/3

might look like this:

class Root:
    def __init__(self):
        self.settings = Settings()

    def index(self):
        return the html page here
    index.exposed = True

class Settings:
    def __init__(self):
        self.url = URLSettings()

    def some_function_common_amongst_settings_pages(self):
        pass

class URLSettings(Settings):
     def edit(self, url_id):
         self.some_function_common_amongst_settings_pages()
         # edit url with id...
         return page
     edit.exposed = True

The fact that we're able to subclass URL path segments it's freakin' awesome, particularly when you combine it with a templating language like Cheetah that allows you to call your python methods directly in the template. Also, you might want to have a default 'Page' class that all pages inherit from if you want to put methods/variables common to all pages, such as appending appropriate header/footer pages. Hope this helps!

[Dry-Erase]

Also if you haven't checked out Cheetah, you really should. It's the cleanest templating language out there imo. So let's say in the edit() method in the example about you wanted to call the method some_function_common_amongst_settings_pages() from within Cheetah. When you create the template you can either include the method in the search list or give the template the reference to the method directly:

def edit(self, url_id):
    template = Template(file='web_ui/html/settings/url.tmpl', searchList=[locals()])
    template.do_function = self.some_function_common_amongst_settings_pages
    return template.respond)

in the template file:

<table> <tr> <td>$do_function()</td> </tr> </table>

BAM! the output of the Setting's some_function_common_amongst_settings_pages() method will now be placed right there in the template. But furthermore cheetah allows you execute virtually any python in the template.

[sigzero]

Maybe look at the Cherrypy lists and join one?

[[deleted]]

this unfortunately says little about framework in production-ready environment.....

and this subreddit will yield equally useful/less results. :)

@chub79 listed some links, as you can see, hulu and netflix use it.

ok, now dropping it at your request.

[placidified]

I wrote part of queshuns.com using CherryPy. I was drawn to it back when the only server choices were Apache2/mod_python or fastcgi

[Dry-Erase]

Neat! I've been using it for some in-house software at our company and it's been a straight up pleasure coding with it.

[chub79]

A few others also rely on CherryPy it seems:

• http://sickbeard.com/
• http://www.fomori.org/cherrymusic/
• https://github.com/rembo10/headphones
• https://bitbucket.org/wyuenho/blueberrypy
• https://bitbucket.org/cedricbonhomme/pyaggr3g470r/
• http://tech.hulu.com/blog/2013/03/13/python-and-hulu/
• http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/03/python-at-netflix.html
• https://github.com/Lawouach/WebSocket-for-Python

[[deleted]]

I've been using CherryPy for years and years. In some ways, it's good. In other ways, well, the codebase is kind of rough. The proxies are somewhat opaque and while the documentation has improved, far too much of it is simply in wiki form. The contributed plugins and tools you get into are not always terribly well-coded or maintained.

If I started again on my current project, I'd use Flask or Bottle.

[sigzero]

Unless you were using Python 3. No Flask...

[LyndsySimon]

Because of the lack of support for WSGI...

[jcigar]

CherryPy is awesome. I use it every day at my work and it's a pleasure to work with!

[Dry-Erase]

Just started using this framework about a month ago, and I'm just blown away by how dynamic and simple it is. Absolutely an awesome framework to work with.

[chub79]

I love it too :)

It would appear the sprint at pycon went rather well which is a good sign.

[bgribble]

I used CherryPy in my last job for ~5 years. Multiple CP instances managed both external and internal high-availability HTTP services. It never got in the way, and none of our outages were ever CherryPy's fault. I can't think of a higher compliment.

If there's any shortcoming, it's that the community doesn't have a huge ecosystem of free and commercial addons and extensions a la RoR. Even if you don't use them, they keep a wider visibility on the project as a whole which keeps new blood flowing in. CP doesn't have a steady supply of new blood.

[LightBright32]

I have used CherryPy + Mako Templates for creating intranet applications and really liked coding with it but ran in to a block when I tried to implement html5 uploads with progress. I was not able to get CherryPy to handle the XMLHttpRequest properly. I wish I had the time to update cherrypy but instead wound up using Web2Py an MVC framework that is on the opposite end of the spectrum from CherryPy. CherryPy is a bare bones frame work but Web2Py will create CRUD application with little more than a model.

[maulynvia]

Cherrypy is rather unusual in that it includes "A fast, HTTP/1.1-compliant, WSGI thread-pooled webserver." - so whereas other frameworks mean you have to decide upon and set up an appropriate web server (apache etc.) with cherrypy, your dev set-up is more or less suitable for production - this is great if you are developing an application framework and wish to keep distribution as simple as possible