Running Tornado in apache

My end goal is to implement a WebSocket server using python.

I'm accomplishing this by importing tornado in my python scripts. I've also installed mod_wsgi in apache, and their script outputs Hello World!, so WSGI seems to be working fine. Tornado is also working fine as far as I can tell.

The issue comes when I use tornado's wsgi "Hello, world" script:

import tornado.web
import tornado.wsgi
import wsgiref.simple_server

class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.write("Hello, world")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    application = tornado.wsgi.WSGIApplication([
        (r"/", MainHandler),
    ])
    server = wsgiref.simple_server.make_server('', 8888, application)
    server.serve_forever()

First, I get a 500 error and the log tells me WSGI can't find 'application'.

So I remove if __name__ == "__main__", and the page loads infinitely.

I assume this is because of server.serve_forever() so I removed it in an attempt to see Hello, world

But now I just get 404: Not Found. It's not my apache 404 page, and I know that the server can find my main .wsgi file...

You can't use websockets with Tornado's WSGIApplication. To use Tornado's websocket support you have to use Tornado's HTTPServer, not apache.

The WSGIApplication handlers are relative to the webserver root. If your application url is /myapp, your 'application' must look like this:

application = tornado.wsgi.WSGIApplication([
    (r"/myapp", MainHandler),
    (r"/myapp/login/etc", LoginEtcHandler),
])

Oh, and it seems like the documentation is shit (as usual) and __name__ will look something like this when running under apache: _mod_wsgi_8a447ce1677c71c08069303864e1283e.

So! a correct "Hello World" python script will look like this:

/var/www/wsgi-scripts/myapp.wsgi:

import tornado.web
import tornado.wsgi
import wsgiref.simple_server

class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
         self.write('Hello World')

application = tornado.wsgi.WSGIApplication([
    (r"/myapp", MainHandler),
])

And in the apache config (not .htaccess):

WSGIScriptAlias /myapp /var/www/wsgi-scripts/myapp.wsgi

To use tornado in apache,add a mod-wsgi plugin to apache.