index.py: Oldschool Web Development for Humans

I miss the 'ol PHP/Apache days of throwing random files/folders on a web server. I want to try to bring that back to Python land (maybe).

This is an experiment — it might not go very far.

The Concept

• You can shove shit in a directory, and it'll just get served automatically.
• Use flask (or any other WSGI framework) if you want to, no configuration needed.
• No maintinence/deployment required to make changes — just make changes to the filesystem.

The real end goal here is to have a Python application running at playground.kennethreitz.org on a Digital Ocean box that can be used to host all sorts of applications and random files for fun, just by managing the filesystem — like it was back in the PHP days.

Basic Structure of a Deployment

Subject to (vastly) change:

root/index.py <--gets served by default
root/sometoy/somefile.txt <-- gets served
root/sometoy/index.py <-- gets run automatically for /sometoy/, stdout is output.

Likely a CLI runner, akin to:

$ index.py .
# spawns gunicorn app for you, with additional arguments.