Question

I’m trying to get the URL that has been requested in Python without using a web framework.

For example, on a page (let’s say /main/index.html), the user clicks on a URL to go to /main/foo/bar (/foo/bar doesn’t exist). Apache (with mod_wsgi) then redirects the user to a PHP script at /main/, which then gets the url and searches MySQL for any matching fields. Then the rest of the field is returned. This helped in PHP:

$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];

I’d rather not use PHP since it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the PHP code whilst the database keeps changing in structure.

I’m pretty sure there’s a better way altogether and any mention would be greatly appreciated. For the sake of relevancy, is this even possible (to get the requested URL in Python)? Should I just use a framework, although it seems quite simple?

Thanks in advance,

Jamie

Note: I don’t want to use GET for security purposes.

Answer 1

Unlike PHP, Python is a general purpose language and doesn’t have this built-in.

The way you can gather this information depends on the deployment solution:

• CGI (mostly Apache with mod_python, deprecated): see @Antti Haapala solution
• WSGI (most other deployment solutions): see @gurney alex solution

But you will encouter much more problems: session hanling, url management, cookies, and even juste simple POST/GET parsing. All of this need to be done manually if you don’t use a framework.

Now, if you feel like a framework is overkill (but really, incredible tools like Django are worth it), you can use a micro framework like bottle.

Microframeworks will typically make this heavy lifting for you, but without the complicated setup or the additional advanced features. Bottle has actually zero setup an is a one file lib.

Hello word with bottle:

from bottle import route, run, request

@route('/hello/:name')
def index(name='World'):
    return '<b>Hello %s! You are at %s</b>' % (name, request.path)

run(host='localhost', port=8080)

request.path contains what you want, and if you visit http://127.0.0.1:8080/hello/you, you will get:

Hello you! You are at /hello/you