Question

I have an internal cherrypy server that serves static files and answers XMLRPC requests. All works fine, but 1-2 times a day i need to update this static files and database. Of course i can just stop server, run update and start server. But this is not very clean since all other code that communicate with server via XMLRPC will have disconnects and users will see “can’t connect” in broswers. And this adds additional complexity – i need some external start / stop / update code, wile all updaes can be perfectly done within cherrypy server itself.

Is it possible to somehow “pause” cherrypy programmatically so it will server static “busy” page and i can update data without fear that right now someone is downloading file A from server and i will update file B he wants next, so he will get different file versions.

I have tried to implement this programmatically, but where is a problem here. Cherrypy is multithread (and this is good), so even if i introduce a global “busy” flag i need some way to wait for all threads to complete aready existing tasks before i can update data. Can’t find such way :(.

Answer 1

CherryPy’s engine controls such things. When you call engine.stop(), the HTTP server shuts down, but first it waits for existing requests to complete. This mode is designed to allow for debugging to occur while not serving requests. See this state machine diagram. Note that stop is not the same as exit, which really stops everything and exits the process.

You could call stop, then manually start up an HTTP server again with a different app to serve a “busy” page, then make your edits, then stop the interim server, then call engine.start() and engine.block() again and be on your way. Note that this will mean a certain amount of downtime as the current requests finish and the new HTTP server takes over listening on the socket, but that will guarantee all current requests are done before you start making changes.

Alternately, you could write a bit of WSGI middleware which usually passes requests through unchanged, but when tripped returns a “busy” page. Current requests would still be allowed to complete, so there might be a period in which you’re not sure if your edits will affect requests that are in progress. How to write WSGI middleware doesn’t fit very well in an SO reply; search for resources like this one. When you’re ready to hook it up in CherryPy, see http://docs.cherrypy.org/dev/concepts/config.html#wsgi