Twisted Web

Twisted Web is:

• ​an HTTP server, that can be used as ​a library or run as a stand-alone server
• ​an HTML templating engine
• ​an HTTP client library

Twisted Web supports numerous standards; for example, it can serve as a WSGI and CGI container, or ​an XMLRPC server. It can also serve static content. Twisted Web provides built-in support for name-based virtual hosts, reverse proxying, XML parsing, and more.

Advantages

Twisted Web is a very simple to set up stand-alone server. For example, to run a server that serves static content out of the current directory, you can just run this short command line:

twistd web --path . --port 8080

To run a WSGI application, it's just as simple:

twistd web --wsgi my.application.name --port 8080

Because Twisted Web is also a Python library with a documented API, you can configure your server entirely using Python. For example, let's say you have a bunch of directories with names corresponding to each domain you want to serve from your web server. Here's the configuration file which creates a virtual host configuration serving static content for each domain out of the directory matching its name:

# virtual.rpy
from twisted.python.filepath import FilePath
from twisted.web.static import File
from twisted.web.vhost import NameVirtualHost
resource = NameVirtualHost()
for p in FilePath(".").children():
    resource.addHost(p.basename(), File(p.path))

This configuration can be run with:

twistd web --resource-script=virtual.rpy --port 8080

Unlike some other simple-to-run Python web servers, Twisted Web is an production-grade server that can be used to deploy real applications. Among other sites, this web site (twistedmatrix.com) is run entirely via Twisted Web. Because it's programmable, you can customize your deployment as much or as little as you like, including having your web server run ​periodic tasks. Because it's self-contained and requires no configuration, it's ideal for developing web applications because your production environment can mirror your deployment environment very closely with little effort.

What It's Not

Twisted Web is a web server, and a framework for doing things with the web - although it shares some components in common with frameworks like ​Django, it's not a "web framework" in the same sense. The Twisted ecosystem includes many different web-related tools. Learn which one is right for you.

Download

See the Downloads page.

Twisted Web is available under [source:trunk/LICENSE the MIT Free Software licence].

Documentation

​Documentation is available for Twisted Web. An ​API reference of Twisted and all subprojects is also available.

Contact

Subscribe to the ​twisted-web mailing list or visit the #twisted.web channel on irc.freenode.net to ask questions.

​Report a bug or ​request a feature using the issue tracker (registration required), or browse Twisted Web tickets.