[chubot]

I'm still using FastCGI! It works well on Dreamhost.

The Python support is not good! In theory you just write a WSGI app, and it will work under a FastCGI wrapper.

But I had to revive the old "flup" wrapper, since Dreamhost has Python 2. I downloaded an older tarball and build it myself.

Use case: I parse thousands of shell scripts on every release and upload the results as a ".wwz" file, which is just a zip file served by a FastCGI script.

https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.8.1/test/wild.wwz/

So whenever there's a URL with .wwz in it, you're hitting a FastCGI script!

This technique makes backing up a website a lot easier, as you can sync a single 50 MB zip file, rather than 10,000 tiny files, which takes forever to stat() the file system metadata.

It's more rsync-friendly, in other words.

I also use it for logs in my continuous build: http://travis-ci.oilshell.org/jobs/

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Does anyone know of any other web hosts that support FastCGI well? I like having my site portable and host independent. I think FastCGI is a good open standard for dynamic content, and it works well on shared hosting (which has a lot of the benefits of the cloud, and not many of the downsides).

[giancarlostoro]

> The Python support is not good! In theory you just write a WSGI app, and it will work under a FastCGI wrapper.

I keep wishing we had webhosts that supported WSGI as 'shared hosting' with all the other benefits of a shared webhost.

[chubot]

That's what I want too!

It works on Dreamhost, but it takes some effort.

FastCGI provides that but the Python libraries are not that well documented, and sometimes unmaintained. For some reason this appears to be a "cultural" thing and not a technical issue.

I wrote a whole bunch of comments about my plans to work on that here (andyc):

https://lobste.rs/s/xl63ah/fastcgi_forgotten_treasure#c_65gp...

I'm probably going to share my .wwz Python WSGI/FastCGI script. And show the hacks I did to deploy it on Dreamhost.

Long term I want to build FastCGI support into https://www.oilshell.org/ so the same problem doesn't exist there! i.e. the fact that you CAN deploy Python on many shared hosts, but nobody does because the ecosystem doesn't support it. Whereas the PHP ecosystem does support it, but the language is hard to learn.

[parenthesis]

Have a look at NearlyFreeSpeech:

https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/technology/-

[chubot]

Thanks, I've heard of them and I like the emphasis on longevity! I will likely try to stand up my FastCGI scripts there!

[deaddodo]

> Does anyone know of any other web hosts that support FastCGI well

I believe Dreamhost is the only larger host that does so. But there are a few that support WSGI directly either via mod_wsgi or uWSGI.

[genewitch]

nginx on gentoo has a relatively straightforward path to using fastcgi (fcgiwrap). I'm "oldschool" in that i don't really care about what fancy functionality i gain with some new tech (like nodejs) when all i want to do is speak to a very specific API endpoint, or handle a specific API call from some server like rocket.chat or mattermost.

I contemplated using nodejs or something else, but the ability to bang out a script that answers on a URL on nginx is so much easier, python or otherwise.