hg-review / bundled / flask / docs / deploying / others.rst

Other Servers

There are popular servers written in Python that allow the execution of WSGI applications as well. Keep in mind though that some of these servers were written for very specific applications and might not work as well for standard WSGI application such as Flask powered ones.


Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. Because it is non-blocking and uses epoll, it can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections, which means it is ideal for real-time web services. Integrating this service with Flask is a trivial task:

from tornado.wsgi import WSGIContainer
from tornado.httpserver import HTTPServer
from tornado.ioloop import IOLoop
from yourapplication import app

http_server = HTTPServer(WSGIContainer(app))



from gevent.wsgi import WSGIServer
from yourapplication import app



Gunicorn 'Green Unicorn' is a WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. It's a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. It supports both eventlet and greenlet. Running a Flask application on this server is quite simple:

gunicorn myproject:app

Proxy Setups

If you deploy your application behind an HTTP proxy you will need to rewrite a few headers in order for the application to work. The two problematic values in the WSGI environment usually are REMOTE_ADDR and HTTP_HOST. Werkzeug ships a fixer that will solve some common setups, but you might want to write your own WSGI middleware for specific setups.

The most common setup invokes the host being set from X-Forwarded-Host and the remote address from X-Forward-For:

from werkzeug.contrib.fixers import ProxyFix
app.wsgi_app = ProxyFix(app.wsgi_app)



class CustomProxyFix(object):

    def __init__(self, app): = app

    def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
        host = environ.get('HTTP_X_FHOST', '')
        if host:
            environ['HTTP_HOST'] = host
        return, start_response)

app.wsgi_app = CustomProxyFix(app.wsgi_app)
Tip: Use camelCasing e.g. ProjME to search for