Providing XML-RPC Services via CGI

February 8, 2002 | Fredrik Lundh

The following sample script shows how to use the standard CGI interface to implement a simple XML-RPC responder. You need to implement the dispatch method yourself.

This should be turned into a small support class, allowing the user to override the “giveup” and “dispatch” methods instead of modifying the script. No time for that today, though… /F

#!/usr/bin/python -u
# simple xmlrpc service

import sys, os, xmlrpclib

sys.stderr = sys.stdout

MAX_REQUEST = 50000

def giveup(message):
    print "Status: 400"
    print
    print "sorry,", message
    sys.exit(0)

if os.environ.get("REQUEST_METHOD") != "POST":
    giveup("invalid request")

bytes = int(os.environ.get("CONTENT_LENGTH", 0))
if bytes > MAX_REQUEST:
    giveup("request too large")

params, method = xmlrpclib.loads(sys.stdin.read(bytes))

result = dispatch(method, params)

if not isinstance(result, type(())):
    result = (result,)

response = xmlrpclib.dumps(result, methodresponse=1)

print "Content-Type: text/xml"
print "Content-Length:", len(response)
print
print response