How Do I Properly Call A Python Pyro Client Using Php And Apache Web Server?

I have a Python3 Pyro4 server client app that works great when run from command line. server.py import Pyro4 @Pyro4.expose class JokeGen(object): def __init__(self): s

Solution 1:

Looks a bit like this question https://superuser.com/questions/646062/granting-write-permissions-to-www-data-group

I wanted to suggest using the PYTHONPATH environment variable to point to a library install location readable by the www-data user where you'd copy the python modules it needs to acces, but I think this is considered bad form nowadays.

Probably best is to create a Python Virtualenv that is accessible for the www-data user and install all required modules into that, using the pip command from that virtualenv. You may have to use some sudo/chown dance to get this right still.

Another way perhaps is to not bother with calling a python subprocess at all, but use Pyro's HTTP gateway. That way you can simply do a HTTP request from PHP to a locally running Pyro http gateway process, which will translate it into a proper Pyro call. I don't know PHP but it seems to me that it should be easy to make a custom http request to a server running on some localhost port. This may be faster as well because you're not starting up python processes for every call.

(edit): another succesfully working solution seemed to be the following, where sudo is used to invoke pip under the appropriate user, letting it install the library into www-data's .local library folder:

• create /var/www/.local and /var/www/.cache folders, giving www-data permissons to these folders only (and not /var/www to avoid security issues)
• invoke sudo -H -u www-data pip3 install pyro4 You may still need to add --user to the pip command if it's an older version, because I think that only recent pip versions install to the user's lib folder by default instead of to the global system python's lib folder.