waitress-serve

Waitress comes bundled with a thin command-line wrapper around the waitress.serve function called waitress-serve. This is useful for development, and in production situations where serving of static assets is delegated to a reverse proxy, such as Nginx or Apache.

Note

This feature is new as of Waitress 0.8.4.

waitress-serve takes the very same arguments as the waitress.serve function, but where the function’s arguments have underscores, waitress-serve uses hyphens. Thus:

import myapp

waitress.serve(myapp.wsgifunc, port=8041, url_scheme='https')

Is equivalent to:

waitress-serve --port=8041 --url-scheme=https myapp:wsgifunc

The full argument list is given below.

Boolean arguments are represented by flags. If you wish to explicitly set a flag, simply use it by its name. Thus the flag:

--expose-tracebacks

Is equivalent to passing expose_tracebacks=True to waitress.serve.

All flags have a negative equivalent. These are prefixed with no-; thus using the flag:

--no-expose-tracebacks

Is equivalent to passing expose_tracebacks=False to waitress.serve.

If at any time you want the full argument list, use the --help flag.

Applications are specified similarly to PasteDeploy, where the format is myapp.mymodule:wsgifunc. As some application frameworks use application objects, you can use dots to resolve attributes like so: myapp.mymodule:appobj.wsgifunc.

A number of frameworks, web.py being an example, have factory methods on their application objects that return usable WSGI functions when called. For cases like these, waitress-serve has the --call flag. Thus:

waitress-serve --call myapp.mymodule.app.wsgi_factory

Would load the myapp.mymodule module, and call app.wsgi_factory to get a WSGI application function to be passed to waitress.server.

Note

As of 0.8.6, the current directory is automatically included on sys.path.

Invocation

Usage:

waitress-serve [OPTS] MODULE:OBJECT

Common options:

--help

Show this information.

--call

Call the given object to get the WSGI application.

--host=ADDR

Hostname or IP address on which to listen, default is ‘0.0.0.0’, which means “all IP addresses on this host”.

--port=PORT

TCP port on which to listen, default is ‘8080’

--unix-socket=PATH

Path of Unix socket. If a socket path is specified, a Unix domain socket is made instead of the usual inet domain socket.

Not available on Windows.

--unix-socket-perms=PERMS

Octal permissions to use for the Unix domain socket, default is ‘600’.

--url-scheme=STR

Default wsgi.url_scheme value, default is ‘http’.

--url-prefix=STR

The SCRIPT_NAME WSGI environment value. Setting this to anything except the empty string will cause the WSGI SCRIPT_NAME value to be the value passed minus any trailing slashes you add, and it will cause the PATH_INFO of any request which is prefixed with this value to be stripped of the prefix. Default is the empty string.

--ident=STR

Server identity used in the ‘Server’ header in responses. Default is ‘waitress’.

Tuning options:

--threads=INT

Number of threads used to process application logic, default is 4.

--backlog=INT

Connection backlog for the server. Default is 1024.

--recv-bytes=INT

Number of bytes to request when calling socket.recv(). Default is 8192.

--send-bytes=INT

Number of bytes to send to socket.send(). Default is 18000. Multiples of 9000 should avoid partly-filled TCP packets.

--outbuf-overflow=INT

A temporary file should be created if the pending output is larger than this. Default is 1048576 (1MB).

--inbuf-overflow=INT

A temporary file should be created if the pending input is larger than this. Default is 524288 (512KB).

--connection-limit=INT

Stop creating new channelse if too many are already active. Default is 100.

--cleanup-interval=INT

Minimum seconds between cleaning up inactive channels. Default is 30. See --channel-timeout.

--channel-timeout=INT

Maximum number of seconds to leave inactive connections open. Default is 120. ‘Inactive’ is defined as ‘has recieved no data from the client and has sent no data to the client’.

--[no-]log-socket-errors

Toggle whether premature client disconnect tracepacks ought to be logged. On by default.

--max-request-header-size=INT

Maximum size of all request headers combined. Default is 262144 (256KB).

--max-request-body-size=INT

Maximum size of request body. Default is 1073741824 (1GB).

--[no-]expose-tracebacks

Toggle whether to expose tracebacks of unhandled exceptions to the client. Off by default.

--asyncore-loop-timeout=INT

The timeout value in seconds passed to asyncore.loop(). Default is 1.

--asyncore-use-poll

The use_poll argument passed to asyncore.loop(). Helps overcome open file descriptors limit. Default is False.