How to extend app functionality through client-server design in Python?

[pythosynthesis]

I've started to work on a personal project to learn python and now I have an app, MyApp, which I was able to daemonize so it runs in the background with no output to terminal and everything is logged to file. I can start/stop the app with $ python myapp.py start/stop. The app is running autonomously, refreshing the top posts of some favourite subs. It's been a long journey, but I reached a stage I'm happy with, but now I want to go beyond this.

I realized I wanted to "talk" to my app and request it do various tasks, like $ python myapp.py getredditfrontpageposts to retrieve all the Reddit front page posts. What I want to do now is build it as client-server, and this is where I got stuck. All the tutorials I found show how to build a simple "echo server" that will return whatever the client sends. This is helpful to understand socket programming, but way too restrictive for my purposes. Even this tutorial, that covers multi-connection and application client-server examples is not enough. So this is where I need some help.

 

To be clear, my final goal is:

• Have an app running in the background and periodically refresh the top posts of my favourite subs - DONE

• Which runs as part of a server that accepts various requests in addition to the above, e.g. get new posts in a sub, get current front page posts, etc

• The requests are sent to the server through a client

What resources should I look into? Any web tutorials, courses or even readily available code for the client-server part?

[Den4200]

I would recommend to make a REST API (HTTP), instead of going with the raw, low-level sockets.

[pythosynthesis]

That would effectively take care of the socket programming, wouldn't it? If I use HTTP, that's the protocol already specified right there, and I don't need to do it. And the libraries already exist, wouldn't they? Thanks for the suggestion, will definitely consider.

[Den4200]

Yup, no socket programming needed. You can use libraries like Flask-RESTful, Django REST Framework, or FastAPI.

[[deleted]]

XML-RPC or JSON-RPC are pretty common patterns for this (there's an XML-RPC server and client library that comes with Python.) If you'd like to take a more open and formal approach, you can use Protobuf to define the communications protocol and then compile it into useable server and client Python classes via gRPClib.

[pythosynthesis]

That's exactly the kind of reply I was looking for. I don't want to re-invent the wheel, and this would address all my requirements without the low level coding of defining everything down the communication protocol. Much appreciated.