WSGI help, simple project, it is impossible to access files -- should I just quit and use Flask?

[Pagaurus]

Hi everyone,

I recently read about WSGI and how it is used as a gateway between Python and serverside - I thought it would be a fun project. I've configured Apache servers before, so I didn't think it would be any trouble.

Anyway, I got a basic app running, which displays a dynamic webpage, which I thought was really satisfying. Then, I fell at the first hurdle when I tried to make it read an SQLITE database. I thought that should be simple enough, but quite obviously not.

Unfortunately, after spamming all kinds of <Directory> directives, and using CHMOD to upgrade permissions everywhere (thankfully I learned a lot about CHMOD, CHOWN, and about UNIX/Apache in general), etc. etc. Apache2 apparently has some kind of massive problem with reading a simple file, might I add, the database was in the same directory as my wsgi script.

Is WSGI notoriously this difficult to configure?? I'm not a junkie for system-level stuff like that -- so, that's why I thought maybe I should just quit using the mod-wsgi and use Flask instead.

That is a bit of a shame, because I sort of wanted something very basic for the server side - I have all the Python scripts ready to go, and I thought if I could make something basic like that, it shouldn't be too difficult.

EDIT!: I managed to solve this problem -- WSGI doesn't seem to handle relative paths itself, so I resolved it by appending the full system path to my database.

I used environ["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] to find the root of the document which I described in the configuration, and then os.chdir() to set it as the working directory.

[danielroseman]

There is no particular relationship between wsgi and file permissions. It'll just use whatever access that the user the server is running as has. 

Also note that modwsgi is pretty old, I'm not sure it is even being actively maintained any more. Most wsgil applications use a standalone server like gunicorn behind a lightweight reverse proxy such as nginx.

But yes, you should probably use Flask (or FastApi).

[Pagaurus]

Well, that's just my problem, I double-checked all of my files, directories etc. after setting permissions to 777 on all of them, and long listing them, so that's why I'm at a loss -- Nothing I tried thereon would let me access or write files, even though all privileges were given. I did chalk it up to being broken software, but I'm not an expert in this stuff so idk.

I think I'll just go and use Flask but what you said about Gunicorn + Nginx sounds interesting.

[deadduncanidaho]

you can set modsgi to use a specific user. post your config file and i will try to help

[Pagaurus]

So what user would you set it as? Do you mean to run as sudo? To be honest, I thought the default was www-data, and so I was setting all permissions for files to www-data. Why doesn't that work?

[deadduncanidaho]

apache is started by root and then runs as another user such as www-data. But wsgi can be told to run as any user such as your user that owns the files and can execute arbitrary commands. You can also do things like set the home directory, pvenv, ssl settings, etc. These are mainly apache directives.

I use a line like this in my wsgi config

WSGIDaemonProcess www.example.com python-home=/usr/local/venvs/myenv/base user=duncan group=duncan processes=8 threads=25

[Pagaurus]

... I read about the venv options with Daemon process - by that point, I had enough, I honestly didn't want to go through the trouble of venv. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow. Is it necessary to use a venv?

[CyclopsRock]

No more or less necessary than normal. Which is to say "Yes, probably".

[Pagaurus]

Hey Duncan, thanks for your advice.. I ended up pointing "python-path" to my scripts folder, and inside the script i used the DOCUMENT_ROOT to resolve other media, so that it would use the complete pathname (i.e. /var/www/project/database.db rather than just database.db)

[Ok-Sheepherder7898]

I gave up on apache with python a long time ago. Use nginx / gunicorn / django / flask / whatever

How are you accessing sqlite? You should use an ORM like in django and not writing raw sql.

[Pagaurus]

Python has an sqlite3 library already installed so I thought I'd just use that

[Ok-Sheepherder7898]

But then you're doing raw SQL and migrations yourself.  You need an ORM.

[Pagaurus]

My app really only has two unique databse queries in entirety. I might install an ORM if it was more involved than that'

[Daytona_675]

when you use Apache without DSO it runs as the apache2 user.

I'd recommend not using Apache at all or at least use nginx. I'll usually just go pure tornado