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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T18:04:00+00:00

CherryPy claims: Your CherryPy powered web applications are in fact stand-alone Python applications embedding

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CherryPy claims:

Your CherryPy powered web applications
are in fact stand-alone Python
applications embedding their own
multi-threaded web server. You can
deploy them anywhere you can run
Python applications. Apache is not
required, but it’s possible to run a
CherryPy application behind it (or
lighttpd, or IIS). CherryPy
applications run on Windows, Linux,
Mac OS X and any other platform
supporting Python.

Having come from PHP and wanting to learn Python, I came upon a thread here in SO while looking for a webserver I can setup to start Python web development. However, after almost googling myself to death, I can’t still find one. I came across entries like “Django has its own lightweight webserver” and the aforementioned Cherrypy.

What I am confused about is this :I was used to using XAMPP, where I have a web server, a database server and my application and I can’t visualize the idea of a “web server inside the application itself”. How do I connect to my database server then? How do I configure stuff like custom urls and directory protection (much like what I do in Apache)?

Thanks in advance guys!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Apache is a large, rich, powerful and complicated webserver — you can configure everything and a half, there are many plug-in modules (all the various mod_this, mod_that, etc), and so forth. That’s great, but of course there are niches for smaller, lighter webservers as well — lighttpd (which your cherrypy quote mentions) is an example of one, focusing on speed and simplicity; cherrypy is another, focusing on simplicity and Python support.

    Of course you can still configure several aspects, see the tutorial section about the configuration files for a short overview, the reference for more details — but it won’t be anywhere as rich as Apache (hey, few webservers are, except maybe IIS;-). Probably some configuration options that you may feel are missing may be easily compensated with Python code, but not all — that’s why you may want to run cherrypy “behind” other servers!

    The way you code your Python web apps need not be constrained by the web server you’re using: just program to the WSGI standard (and that’s what just about all web app frameworks these days support), and your deployment options are boundless — from cherrypy, or even just the reference wsgi implementation that comes with the Python standard library (only recommended for development!-), all the way to Apache with mod_wsgi, IIS, even Google App Engine (it supports WSGI, too!-).

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