Question

I am trying to display an image file in web browser via the Apache server by Python. I am using:
windows 7
apache http server 2.2
python 2.7

Configuration in httpd.conf:

DocumentRoot "C:/Apache2.2/htdocs"
RewriteRule ^images/(.+)$       /imagetest.py?img=$1 [QSA,L]

imagetest.py under htdocs folder :

import cgitb; cgitb.enable()
import cgi

form = cgi.FieldStorage()
imgName = form.getvalue("img")
print "Content-type: image/jpeg"
print
print file(r"C:/imageFolder/" + imgName, "rb").read()

# Also tried 
# sys.stdout.write( "Content-type: image/jpeg\n\n" + file("C:/imageFolder/" + imgName, "rb").read() )
# instead of "print"s above

The http://localhost/images/0001.jpg URL gives;
– The image cannot be displayed because it contains errors error at Firefox,
– nothing at Chrome.
But in both cases the image fetched (about 1 MB) with http status code 200 (looked with Firebug).
Any suggestions?
Additionally, is it right way of doing stuff like this way? I decided to use cgi because of this server will serve nothing but images and some video files indirectly (namely via python script). I mean, no complicated operations there. However this server should handle many requests fast and reliable. Thanks.

Answer 1

file.read() is not guaranteed to read the entire file. Use shutil.copyfileobj() to copy the file contents to sys.stdout.

Or, better yet, enable and use mod_xsendfile.