Deploying Your Pyramid Application

So you've written a sweet application and you want to deploy it outside of your local machine. We're not going to cover caching here, but suffice it to say that there are a lot of things to consider when optimizing your pyramid application.

At a high level, you need to expose a server on ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS). Underneath this layer, however, is a plethora of different configurations that can be used to get a request from a client, into your application, and return the response.

Client <---> WSGI Server <---> Your Application

Due to the beauty of standards, many different configurations can be used to generate this basic setup, injecting caching layers, load balancers, and so on into the basic workflow.

Disclaimer

It's important to note that the setups discussed here are meant to give some direction to newer users. Deployment is almost always highly dependent on the application's specific purposes. These setups have been used for many different projects in production with much success, but never verbatim.

What is WSGI?

WSGI is a Python standard dictating the interface between a server and an application. The entry point to your pyramid application is an object implementing the WSGI interface. Thus, your application can be served by any server supporting WSGI.

There are many different servers implementing the WSGI standard in existence. A short list includes:

  • waitress
  • paste.httpserver
  • CherryPy
  • uWSGI
  • gevent
  • mod_wsgi

For more information on WSGI, see the WSGI home.

Special Considerations

Certain environments and web servers require special considerations when deploying your Pyramid application due to implementation details of Python, the web server, or popular packages.

Forked and threaded servers share some common gotchas and solutions.

Forked and Threaded Servers