The Application/Framework Side

The application object is simply a callable object that accepts two arguments. The term "object" should not be misconstrued as requiring an actual object instance: a function, method, class, or instance with a __call__ method are all acceptable for use as an application object. Application objects must be able to be invoked more than once, as virtually all servers/gateways (other than CGI) will make such repeated requests.

(Note: although we refer to it as an "application" object, this should not be construed to mean that application developers will use WSGI as a web programming API! It is assumed that application developers will continue to use existing, high-level framework services to develop their applications. WSGI is a tool for framework and server developers, and is not intended to directly support application developers.)

Here are two example application objects; one is a function, and the other is a class:

def simple_app(environ, start_response):
    """Simplest possible application object"""
    status = '200 OK'
    response_headers = [('Content-type','text/plain')]
    start_response(status, response_headers)
    return ['Hello world!\n']


class AppClass:
    """Produce the same output, but using a class

    (Note: 'AppClass' is the "application" here, so calling it
    returns an instance of 'AppClass', which is then the iterable
    return value of the "application callable" as required by
    the spec.
    
    If we wanted to use *instances* of 'AppClass' as application
    objects instead, we would have to implement a '__call__'
    method, which would be invoked to execute the application,
    and we would need to create an instance for use by the
    server or gateway.
    """

    def __init__(self, environ, start_response):
        self.environ = environ
        self.start = start_response

    def __iter__(self):
        status = '200 OK'
        response_headers = [('Content-type','text/plain')]
        self.start(status, response_headers)
        yield "Hello world!\n"

The Server/Gateway Side

The server or gateway invokes the application callable once for each request it receives from an HTTP client, that is directed at the application. To illustrate, here is a simple CGI gateway, implemented as a function taking an application object. Note that this simple example has limited error handling, because by default an uncaught exception will be dumped to sys.stderr and logged by the web server.

import os, sys

def run_with_cgi(application):

    environ = dict(os.environ.items())
    environ['wsgi.input']        = sys.stdin
    environ['wsgi.errors']       = sys.stderr
    environ['wsgi.version']      = (1,0)
    environ['wsgi.multithread']  = False
    environ['wsgi.multiprocess'] = True
    environ['wsgi.run_once']    = True

    if environ.get('HTTPS','off') in ('on','1'):
        environ['wsgi.url_scheme'] = 'https'
    else:
        environ['wsgi.url_scheme'] = 'http'

    headers_set = []
    headers_sent = []

    def write(data):
        if not headers_set:
             raise AssertionError("write() before start_response()")

        elif not headers_sent:
             # Before the first output, send the stored headers
             status, response_headers = headers_sent[:] = headers_set
             sys.stdout.write('Status: %s\r\n' % status)
             for header in response_headers:
                 sys.stdout.write('%s: %s\r\n' % header)
             sys.stdout.write('\r\n')

        sys.stdout.write(data)
        sys.stdout.flush()

    def start_response(status,response_headers,exc_info=None):
        if exc_info:
            try:
                if headers_sent:
                    # Re-raise original exception if headers sent
                    raise exc_info[0], exc_info[1], exc_info[2]
            finally:
                exc_info = None     # avoid dangling circular ref
        elif headers_set:
            raise AssertionError("Headers already set!")
            
        headers_set[:] = [status,response_headers]
        return write

    result = application(environ, start_response)
    try:
        for data in result:
            if data:    # don't send headers until body appears
                write(data)
        if not headers_sent:
            write('')   # send headers now if body was empty
    finally:
        if hasattr(result,'close'):
            result.close()

Middleware: Components that Play Both Sides

Note that a single object may play the role of a server with respect to some application(s), while also acting as an application with respect to some server(s). Such "middleware" components can perform such functions as:

• Routing a request to different application objects based on the target URL, after rewriting the environ accordingly.
• Allowing multiple applications or frameworks to run side-by-side in the same process
• Load balancing and remote processing, by forwarding requests and responses over a network
• Perform content postprocessing, such as applying XSL stylesheets

The presence of middleware in general is transparent to both the "server/gateway" and the "application/framework" sides of the interface, and should require no special support. A user who desires to incorporate middleware into an application simply provides the middleware component to the server, as if it were an application, and configures the middleware component to invoke the application, as if the middleware component were a server. Of course, the "application" that the middleware wraps may in fact be another middleware component wrapping another application, and so on, creating what is referred to as a "middleware stack".

For the most part, middleware must conform to the restrictions and requirements of both the server and application sides of WSGI. In some cases, however, requirements for middleware are more stringent than for a "pure" server or application, and these points will be noted in the specification.

Here is a (tongue-in-cheek) example of a middleware component that converts text/plain responses to pig latin, using Joe Strout's piglatin.py. (Note: a "real" middleware component would probably use a more robust way of checking the content type, and should also check for a content encoding. Also, this simple example ignores the possibility that a word might be split across a block boundary.)

from piglatin import piglatin

class LatinIter:

    """Transform iterated output to piglatin, if it's okay to do so
    
    Note that the "okayness" can change until the application yields
    its first non-empty string, so 'transform_ok' has to be a mutable
    truth value."""

    def __init__(self,result,transform_ok):
        if hasattr(result,'close'):
            self.close = result.close
        self._next = iter(result).next
        self.transform_ok = transform_ok

    def __iter__(self):
        return self

    def next(self):
        if self.transform_ok:
            return piglatin(self._next())
        else:
            return self._next()

class Latinator:

    # by default, don't transform output
    transform = False  

    def __init__(self, application):
        self.application = application

    def __call__(environ, start_response):
        
        transform_ok = []
        
        def start_latin(status,response_headers,exc_info=None):

            # Reset ok flag, in case this is a repeat call
            transform_ok[:]=[]  

            for name,value in response_headers:
                if name.lower()=='content-type' and value=='text/plain':
                    transform_ok.append(True)
                    # Strip content-length if present, else it'll be wrong
                    response_headers = [(name,value) 
                        for name,value in response_headers 
                            if name.lower()<>'content-length'
                    ]
                    break
                
            write = start_response(status,response_headers,exc_info)

            if transform_ok:
                def write_latin(data):
                    write(piglatin(data))
                return write_latin
            else:
                return write

        return LatinIter(self.application(environ,start_latin),transform_ok)


# Run foo_app under a Latinator's control, using the example CGI gateway
from foo_app import foo_app
run_with_cgi(Latinator(foo_app))

environ Variables

The environ dictionary is required to contain these CGI environment variables, as defined by the Common Gateway Interface specification [2]. The following variables must be present, unless their value would be an empty string, in which case they may be omitted, except as otherwise noted below.

REQUEST_METHOD

The HTTP request method, such as "GET" or "POST". This cannot ever be an empty string, and so is always required.

SCRIPT_NAME

The initial portion of the request URL's "path" that corresponds to the application object, so that the application knows its virtual "location". This may be an empty string, if the application corresponds to the "root" of the server.

PATH_INFO

The remainder of the request URL's "path", designating the virtual "location" of the request's target within the application. This may be an empty string, if the request URL targets the application root and does not have a trailing slash.

QUERY_STRING

The portion of the request URL that follows the "?", if any. May be empty or absent.

CONTENT_TYPE

The contents of any Content-Type fields in the HTTP request. May be empty or absent.

CONTENT_LENGTH

The contents of any Content-Length fields in the HTTP request. May be empty or absent.

SERVER_NAME, SERVER_PORT

When combined with SCRIPT_NAME and PATH_INFO, these variables can be used to complete the URL. Note, however, that HTTP_HOST, if present, should be used in preference to SERVER_NAME for reconstructing the request URL. See the URL Reconstruction section below for more detail. SERVER_NAME and SERVER_PORT can never be empty strings, and so are always required.

SERVER_PROTOCOL

The version of the protocol the client used to send the request. Typically this will be something like "HTTP/1.0" or "HTTP/1.1" and may be used by the application to determine how to treat any HTTP request headers. (This variable should probably be called REQUEST_PROTOCOL, since it denotes the protocol used in the request, and is not necessarily the protocol that will be used in the server's response. However, for compatibility with CGI we have to keep the existing name.)

HTTP_ Variables

Variables corresponding to the client-supplied HTTP request headers (i.e., variables whose names begin with "HTTP_"). The presence or absence of these variables should correspond with the presence or absence of the appropriate HTTP header in the request.

A server or gateway should attempt to provide as many other CGI variables as are applicable. In addition, if SSL is in use, the server or gateway should also provide as many of the Apache SSL environment variables [5] as are applicable, such as HTTPS=on and SSL_PROTOCOL. Note, however, that an application that uses any CGI variables other than the ones listed above are necessarily non-portable to web servers that do not support the relevant extensions. (For example, web servers that do not publish files will not be able to provide a meaningful DOCUMENT_ROOT or PATH_TRANSLATED.)

A WSGI-compliant server or gateway should document what variables it provides, along with their definitions as appropriate. Applications should check for the presence of any variables they require, and have a fallback plan in the event such a variable is absent.

Note: missing variables (such as REMOTE_USER when no authentication has occurred) should be left out of the environ dictionary. Also note that CGI-defined variables must be strings, if they are present at all. It is a violation of this specification for a CGI variable's value to be of any type other than str.

In addition to the CGI-defined variables, the environ dictionary may also contain arbitrary operating-system "environment variables", and must contain the following WSGI-defined variables:

Finally, the environ dictionary may also contain server-defined variables. These variables should be named using only lower-case letters, numbers, dots, and underscores, and should be prefixed with a name that is unique to the defining server or gateway. For example, mod_python might define variables with names like mod_python.some_variable.

The start_response() Callable

The second parameter passed to the application object is a callable of the form start_response(status,response_headers,exc_info=None). (As with all WSGI callables, the arguments must be supplied positionally, not by keyword.) The start_response callable is used to begin the HTTP response, and it must return a write(body_data) callable (see the Buffering and Streaming section, below).

The status argument is an HTTP "status" string like "200 OK" or "404 Not Found". That is, it is a string consisting of a Status-Code and a Reason-Phrase, in that order and separated by a single space, with no surrounding whitespace or other characters. (See RFC 2616, Section 6.1.1 for more information.) The string must not contain control characters, and must not be terminated with a carriage return, linefeed, or combination thereof.

The response_headers argument is a list of (header_name, header_value) tuples. It must be a Python list; i.e. type(response_headers) is ListType, and the server may change its contents in any way it desires. Each header_name must be a valid HTTP header field-name (as defined by RFC 2616, Section 4.2), without a trailing colon or other punctuation.

Each header_value must not include any control characters, including carriage returns or linefeeds, either embedded or at the end. (These requirements are to minimize the complexity of any parsing that must be performed by servers, gateways, and intermediate response processors that need to inspect or modify response headers.)

In general, the server or gateway is responsible for ensuring that correct headers are sent to the client: if the application omits a header required by HTTP (or other relevant specifications that are in effect), the server or gateway must add it. For example, the HTTP Date: and Server: headers would normally be supplied by the server or gateway.

(A reminder for server/gateway authors: HTTP header names are case-insensitive, so be sure to take that into consideration when examining application-supplied headers!)

Applications and middleware are forbidden from using HTTP/1.1 "hop-by-hop" features or headers, any equivalent features in HTTP/1.0, or any headers that would affect the persistence of the client's connection to the web server. These features are the exclusive province of the actual web server, and a server or gateway should consider it a fatal error for an application to attempt sending them, and raise an error if they are supplied to start_response(). (For more specifics on "hop-by-hop" features and headers, please see the Other HTTP Features section below.)

The start_response callable must not actually transmit the response headers. Instead, it must store them for the server or gateway to transmit only after the first iteration of the application return value that yields a non-empty string, or upon the application's first invocation of the write() callable. In other words, response headers must not be sent until there is actual body data available, or until the application's returned iterable is exhausted. (The only possible exception to this rule is if the response headers explicitly include a Content-Length of zero.)

This delaying of response header transmission is to ensure that buffered and asynchronous applications can replace their originally intended output with error output, up until the last possible moment. For example, the application may need to change the response status from "200 OK" to "500 Internal Error", if an error occurs while the body is being generated within an application buffer.

The exc_info argument, if supplied, must be a Python sys.exc_info() tuple. This argument should be supplied by the application only if start_response is being called by an error handler. If exc_info is supplied, and no HTTP headers have been output yet, start_response should replace the currently-stored HTTP response headers with the newly-supplied ones, thus allowing the application to "change its mind" about the output when an error has occurred.

However, if exc_info is provided, and the HTTP headers have already been sent, start_response must raise an error, and should raise the exc_info tuple. That is:

raise exc_info[0],exc_info[1],exc_info[2]

This will re-raise the exception trapped by the application, and in principle should abort the application. (It is not safe for the application to attempt error output to the browser once the HTTP headers have already been sent.) The application must not trap any exceptions raised by start_response, if it called start_response with exc_info. Instead, it should allow such exceptions to propagate back to the server or gateway. See Error Handling below, for more details.

The application may call start_response more than once, if and only if the exc_info argument is provided. More precisely, it is a fatal error to call start_response without the exc_info argument if start_response has already been called within the current invocation of the application. (See the example CGI gateway above for an illustration of the correct logic.)

Note: servers, gateways, or middleware implementing start_response should ensure that no reference is held to the exc_info parameter beyond the duration of the function's execution, to avoid creating a circular reference through the traceback and frames involved. The simplest way to do this is something like:

def start_response(status,response_headers,exc_info=None):
    if exc_info:
         try:
             # do stuff w/exc_info here
         finally:
             exc_info = None    # Avoid circular ref.

The example CGI gateway provides another illustration of this technique.

Buffering and Streaming

Generally speaking, applications will achieve the best throughput by buffering their (modestly-sized) output and sending it all at once. This is a common approach in existing frameworks such as Zope: the output is buffered in a StringIO or similar object, then transmitted all at once, along with the response headers.

The corresponding approach in WSGI is for the application to simply return a single-element iterable (such as a list) containing the response body as a single string. This is the recommended approach for the vast majority of application functions, that render HTML pages whose text easily fits in memory.

For large files, however, or for specialized uses of HTTP streaming (such as multipart "server push"), an application may need to provide output in smaller blocks (e.g. to avoid loading a large file into memory). It's also sometimes the case that part of a response may be time-consuming to produce, but it would be useful to send ahead the portion of the response that precedes it.

In these cases, applications will usually return an iterator (often a generator-iterator) that produces the output in a block-by-block fashion. These blocks may be broken to coincide with mulitpart boundaries (for "server push"), or just before time-consuming tasks (such as reading another block of an on-disk file).

WSGI servers, gateways, and middleware must not delay the transmission of any block; they must either fully transmit the block to the client, or guarantee that they will continue transmission even while the application is producing its next block. A server/gateway or middleware may provide this guarantee in one of three ways:

1. Send the entire block to the operating system (and request that any O/S buffers be flushed) before returning control to the application, OR
2. Use a different thread to ensure that the block continues to be transmitted while the application produces the next block.
3. (Middleware only) send the entire block to its parent gateway/server

By providing this guarantee, WSGI allows applications to ensure that transmission will not become stalled at an arbitrary point in their output data. This is critical for proper functioning of e.g. multipart "server push" streaming, where data between multipart boundaries should be transmitted in full to the client.

Unicode Issues

HTTP does not directly support Unicode, and neither does this interface. All encoding/decoding must be handled by the application; all strings passed to or from the server must be standard Python byte strings, not Unicode objects. The result of using a Unicode object where a string object is required, is undefined.

Note also that strings passed to start_response() as a status or as response headers must follow RFC 2616 with respect to encoding. That is, they must either be ISO-8859-1 characters, or use RFC 2047 MIME encoding.

On Python platforms where the str or StringType type is in fact Unicode-based (e.g. Jython, IronPython, Python 3000, etc.), all "strings" referred to in this specification must contain only code points representable in ISO-8859-1 encoding (\u0000 through \u00FF, inclusive). It is a fatal error for an application to supply strings containing any other Unicode character or code point. Similarly, servers and gateways must not supply strings to an application containing any other Unicode characters.

Again, all strings referred to in this specification must be of type str or StringType, and must not be of type unicode or UnicodeType. And, even if a given platform allows for more than 8 bits per character in str/StringType objects, only the lower 8 bits may be used, for any value referred to in this specification as a "string".

Error Handling

In general, applications should try to trap their own, internal errors, and display a helpful message in the browser. (It is up to the application to decide what "helpful" means in this context.)

However, to display such a message, the application must not have actually sent any data to the browser yet, or else it risks corrupting the response. WSGI therefore provides a mechanism to either allow the application to send its error message, or be automatically aborted: the exc_info argument to start_response. Here is an example of its use:

try:
    # regular application code here
    status = "200 Froody"
    response_headers = [("content-type","text/plain")]
    start_response(status, response_headers)
    return ["normal body goes here"]  
except:
    # XXX should trap runtime issues like MemoryError, KeyboardInterrupt
    #     in a separate handler before this bare 'except:'...
    status = "500 Oops"
    response_headers = [("content-type","text/plain")]
    start_response(status, response_headers, sys.exc_info())
    return ["error body goes here"]

If no output has been written when an exception occurs, the call to start_response will return normally, and the application will return an error body to be sent to the browser. However, if any output has already been sent to the browser, start_response will reraise the provided exception. This exception should not be trapped by the application, and so the application will abort. The server or gateway can then trap this (fatal) exception and abort the response.

Servers should trap and log any exception that aborts an application or the iteration of its return value. If a partial response has already been written to the browser when an application error occurs, the server or gateway may attempt to add an error message to the output, if the already-sent headers indicate a text/* content type that the server knows how to modify cleanly.

Some middleware may wish to provide additional exception handling services, or intercept and replace application error messages. In such cases, middleware may choose to not re-raise the exc_info supplied to start_response, but instead raise a middleware-specific exception, or simply return without an exception after storing the supplied arguments. This will then cause the application to return its error body iterable (or invoke write()), allowing the middleware to capture and modify the error output. These techniques will work as long as application authors:

1. Always provide exc_info when beginning an error response
2. Never trap errors raised by start_response when exc_info is being provided

HTTP 1.1 Expect/Continue

Servers and gateways that implement HTTP 1.1 must provide transparent support for HTTP 1.1's "expect/continue" mechanism. This may be done in any of several ways:

1. Respond to requests containing an Expect: 100-continue request with an immediate "100 Continue" response, and proceed normally.
2. Proceed with the request normally, but provide the application with a wsgi.input stream that will send the "100 Continue" response if/when the application first attempts to read from the input stream. The read request must then remain blocked until the client responds.
3. Wait until the client decides that the server does not support expect/continue, and sends the request body on its own. (This is suboptimal, and is not recommended.)

Note that these behavior restrictions do not apply for HTTP 1.0 requests, or for requests that are not directed to an application object. For more information on HTTP 1.1 Expect/Continue, see RFC 2616, sections 8.2.3 and 10.1.1.

Other HTTP Features

In general, servers and gateways should "play dumb" and allow the application complete control over its output. They should only make changes that do not alter the effective semantics of the application's response. It is always possible for the application developer to add middleware components to supply additional features, so server/gateway developers should be conservative in their implementation. In a sense, a server should consider itself to be like an HTTP "gateway server", with the application being an HTTP "origin server". (See RFC 2616, section 1.3, for the definition of these terms.)

However, because WSGI servers and applications do not communicate via HTTP, what RFC 2616 calls "hop-by-hop" headers do not apply to WSGI internal communications. WSGI applications must not generate any "hop-by-hop" headers [4], attempt to use HTTP features that would require them to generate such headers, or rely on the content of any incoming "hop-by-hop" headers in the environ dictionary. WSGI servers must handle any supported inbound "hop-by-hop" headers on their own, such as by decoding any inbound Transfer-Encoding, including chunked encoding if applicable.

Applying these principles to a variety of HTTP features, it should be clear that a server may handle cache validation via the If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since request headers and the Last-Modified and ETag response headers. However, it is not required to do this, and the application should perform its own cache validation if it wants to support that feature, since the server/gateway is not required to do such validation.

Similarly, a server may re-encode or transport-encode an application's response, but the application should use a suitable content encoding on its own, and must not apply a transport encoding. A server may transmit byte ranges of the application's response if requested by the client, and the application doesn't natively support byte ranges. Again, however, the application should perform this function on its own if desired.

Note that these restrictions on applications do not necessarily mean that every application must reimplement every HTTP feature; many HTTP features can be partially or fully implemented by middleware components, thus freeing both server and application authors from implementing the same features over and over again.

Thread Support

Thread support, or lack thereof, is also server-dependent. Servers that can run multiple requests in parallel, should also provide the option of running an application in a single-threaded fashion, so that applications or frameworks that are not thread-safe may still be used with that server.

Server Extension APIs

Some server authors may wish to expose more advanced APIs, that application or framework authors can use for specialized purposes. For example, a gateway based on mod_python might wish to expose part of the Apache API as a WSGI extension.

In the simplest case, this requires nothing more than defining an environ variable, such as mod_python.some_api. But, in many cases, the possible presence of middleware can make this difficult. For example, an API that offers access to the same HTTP headers that are found in environ variables, might return different data if environ has been modified by middleware.

In general, any extension API that duplicates, supplants, or bypasses some portion of WSGI functionality runs the risk of being incompatible with middleware components. Server/gateway developers should not assume that nobody will use middleware, because some framework developers specifically intend to organize or reorganize their frameworks to function almost entirely as middleware of various kinds.

So, to provide maximum compatibility, servers and gateways that provide extension APIs that replace some WSGI functionality, must design those APIs so that they are invoked using the portion of the API that they replace. For example, an extension API to access HTTP request headers must require the application to pass in its current environ, so that the server/gateway may verify that HTTP headers accessible via the API have not been altered by middleware. If the extension API cannot guarantee that it will always agree with environ about the contents of HTTP headers, it must refuse service to the application, e.g. by raising an error, returning None instead of a header collection, or whatever is appropriate to the API.

Similarly, if an extension API provides an alternate means of writing response data or headers, it should require the start_response callable to be passed in, before the application can obtain the extended service. If the object passed in is not the same one that the server/gateway originally supplied to the application, it cannot guarantee correct operation and must refuse to provide the extended service to the application.

These guidelines also apply to middleware that adds information such as parsed cookies, form variables, sessions, and the like to environ. Specifically, such middleware should provide these features as functions which operate on environ, rather than simply stuffing values into environ. This helps ensure that information is calculated from environ after any middleware has done any URL rewrites or other environ modifications.

It is very important that these "safe extension" rules be followed by both server/gateway and middleware developers, in order to avoid a future in which middleware developers are forced to delete any and all extension APIs from environ to ensure that their mediation isn't being bypassed by applications using those extensions!

Application Configuration

This specification does not define how a server selects or obtains an application to invoke. These and other configuration options are highly server-specific matters. It is expected that server/gateway authors will document how to configure the server to execute a particular application object, and with what options (such as threading options).

Framework authors, on the other hand, should document how to create an application object that wraps their framework's functionality. The user, who has chosen both the server and the application framework, must connect the two together. However, since both the framework and the server now have a common interface, this should be merely a mechanical matter, rather than a significant engineering effort for each new server/framework pair.

Finally, some applications, frameworks, and middleware may wish to use the environ dictionary to receive simple string configuration options. Servers and gateways should support this by allowing an application's deployer to specify name-value pairs to be placed in environ. In the simplest case, this support can consist merely of copying all operating system-supplied environment variables from os.environ into the environ dictionary, since the deployer in principle can configure these externally to the server, or in the CGI case they may be able to be set via the server's configuration files.

Applications should try to keep such required variables to a minimum, since not all servers will support easy configuration of them. Of course, even in the worst case, persons deploying an application can create a script to supply the necessary configuration values:

from the_app import application

def new_app(environ,start_response):
    environ['the_app.configval1'] = 'something'
    return application(environ,start_response)

But, most existing applications and frameworks will probably only need a single configuration value from environ, to indicate the location of their application or framework-specific configuration file(s). (Of course, applications should cache such configuration, to avoid having to re-read it upon each invocation.)

URL Reconstruction

If an application wishes to reconstruct a request's complete URL, it may do so using the following algorithm, contributed by Ian Bicking:

from urllib import quote
url = environ['wsgi.url_scheme']+'://'

if environ.get('HTTP_HOST'):
    url += environ['HTTP_HOST']
else:
    url += environ['SERVER_NAME']

    if environ['wsgi.url_scheme'] == 'https':
        if environ['SERVER_PORT'] != '443':
           url += ':' + environ['SERVER_PORT']
    else:
        if environ['SERVER_PORT'] != '80':
           url += ':' + environ['SERVER_PORT']

url += quote(environ.get('SCRIPT_NAME',''))
url += quote(environ.get('PATH_INFO',''))
if environ.get('QUERY_STRING'):
    url += '?' + environ['QUERY_STRING']

Note that such a reconstructed URL may not be precisely the same URI as requested by the client. Server rewrite rules, for example, may have modified the client's originally requested URL to place it in a canonical form.

Supporting Older (<2.2) Versions of Python

Some servers, gateways, or applications may wish to support older (<2.2) versions of Python. This is especially important if Jython is a target platform, since as of this writing a production-ready version of Jython 2.2 is not yet available.

For servers and gateways, this is relatively straightforward: servers and gateways targeting pre-2.2 versions of Python must simply restrict themselves to using only a standard "for" loop to iterate over any iterable returned by an application. This is the only way to ensure source-level compatibility with both the pre-2.2 iterator protocol (discussed further below) and "today's" iterator protocol (see PEP 234).

(Note that this technique necessarily applies only to servers, gateways, or middleware that are written in Python. Discussion of how to use iterator protocol(s) correctly from other languages is outside the scope of this PEP.)

For applications, supporting pre-2.2 versions of Python is slightly more complex:

• You may not return a file object and expect it to work as an iterable, since before Python 2.2, files were not iterable. (In general, you shouldn't do this anyway, because it will peform quite poorly most of the time!) Use wsgi.file_wrapper or an application-specific file wrapper class. (See Optional Platform-Specific File Handling for more on wsgi.file_wrapper, and an example class you can use to wrap a file as an iterable.)
• If you return a custom iterable, it must implement the pre-2.2 iterator protocol. That is, provide a __getitem__ method that accepts an integer key, and raises IndexError when exhausted. (Note that built-in sequence types are also acceptable, since they also implement this protocol.)

Finally, middleware that wishes to support pre-2.2 versions of Python, and iterates over application return values or itself returns an iterable (or both), must follow the appropriate recommendations above.

(Note: It should go without saying that to support pre-2.2 versions of Python, any server, gateway, application, or middleware must also use only language features available in the target version, use 1 and 0 instead of True and False, etc.)

Optional Platform-Specific File Handling

Some operating environments provide special high-performance file- transmission facilities, such as the Unix sendfile() call. Servers and gateways may expose this functionality via an optional wsgi.file_wrapper key in the environ. An application may use this "file wrapper" to convert a file or file-like object into an iterable that it then returns, e.g.:

if 'wsgi.file_wrapper' in environ:
    return environ['wsgi.file_wrapper'](filelike, block_size)
else:
    return iter(lambda: filelike.read(block_size), '')

If the server or gateway supplies wsgi.file_wrapper, it must be a callable that accepts one required positional parameter, and one optional positional parameter. The first parameter is the file-like object to be sent, and the second parameter is an optional block size "suggestion" (which the server/gateway need not use). The callable must return an iterable object, and must not perform any data transmission until and unless the server/gateway actually receives the iterable as a return value from the application. (To do otherwise would prevent middleware from being able to interpret or override the response data.)

To be considered "file-like", the object supplied by the application must have a read() method that takes an optional size argument. It may have a close() method, and if so, the iterable returned by wsgi.file_wrapper must have a close() method that invokes the original file-like object's close() method. If the "file-like" object has any other methods or attributes with names matching those of Python built-in file objects (e.g. fileno()), the wsgi.file_wrapper may assume that these methods or attributes have the same semantics as those of a built-in file object.

The actual implementation of any platform-specific file handling must occur after the application returns, and the server or gateway checks to see if a wrapper object was returned. (Again, because of the presence of middleware, error handlers, and the like, it is not guaranteed that any wrapper created will actually be used.)

Apart from the handling of close(), the semantics of returning a file wrapper from the application should be the same as if the application had returned iter(filelike.read, ''). In other words, transmission should begin at the current position within the "file" at the time that transmission begins, and continue until the end is reached.

Of course, platform-specific file transmission APIs don't usually accept arbitrary "file-like" objects. Therefore, a wsgi.file_wrapper has to introspect the supplied object for things such as a fileno() (Unix-like OSes) or a java.nio.FileChannel (under Jython) in order to determine if the file-like object is suitable for use with the platform-specific API it supports.

Note that even if the object is not suitable for the platform API, the wsgi.file_wrapper must still return an iterable that wraps read() and close(), so that applications using file wrappers are portable across platforms. Here's a simple platform-agnostic file wrapper class, suitable for old (pre 2.2) and new Pythons alike:

class FileWrapper:

    def __init__(self, filelike, blksize=8192):
        self.filelike = filelike
        self.blksize = blksize
        if hasattr(filelike,'close'):
            self.close = filelike.close
            
    def __getitem__(self,key):
        data = self.filelike.read(self.blksize)
        if data:
            return data
        raise IndexError

and here is a snippet from a server/gateway that uses it to provide access to a platform-specific API:

environ['wsgi.file_wrapper'] = FileWrapper
result = application(environ, start_response)

try:
    if isinstance(result,FileWrapper):
        # check if result.filelike is usable w/platform-specific
        # API, and if so, use that API to transmit the result.
        # If not, fall through to normal iterable handling
        # loop below.

    for data in result:
        # etc.
        
finally:
    if hasattr(result,'close'):
        result.close()