Question

I’m very new to Python. I just know what Python is.

I have created the below code (in Python IDLE):

print "Hi Welcome to Python test page\n";
print "Now it will show a calculation";
print "30+2=";
print 30+2;

Then I saved this page in my localhost as index.py

I run the script using

http://localhost/index.py

But it does not show the executed Python script. Instead, it showed the above code as HTML. Where is the problem? How can I run a Python file in a web page?

Answer 1

In order for your code to show, you need several things:

Firstly, there needs to be a server that handles HTTP requests. At the moment you are just opening a file with Firefox on your local hard drive. A server like Apache or something similar is required.

Secondly, presuming that you now have a server that serves the files, you will also need something that interprets the code as Python code for the server. For Python users the go to solution is nowadays mod_wsgi. But for simpler cases you could stick with CGI (more info here), but if you want to produce web pages easily, you should go with a existing Python web framework like Django.

Setting this up can be quite the hassle, so be prepared.