python - How to programmatically communicate with Apache?

Question

So many web applications these days run on their own microservers, it can be hard to implement them on shared hosting platforms. The apps listen on a dedicated port you can customize or reverse proxy, but shared hosting usually only has 80 and 443 open.

Just as an example, the handy web-based editor ICEcoder is a PHP application, so you just drop the files in a directory and away you go. However, the Cloud9 editor runs its own server. You can customize the port, but again, you cant run the reverse proxy.

I had the idea of using a PHP or Python CGI script as an intermediary. Something like:

www.mydomain/mydirectory/middleman.py

from BaseHTTPServer import BaseHTTPRequestHandler
import urlparse, json
# hpyothetical apache api
import apache

parsed_path = urlparse.urlparse(self.path)

response = apache(url=parsed_path, port=8080)

sendStuffBack(response)

Would this be possible with Apache? How would I implement it?

Edit: Here is what I did based on @grawity's answer.

helloflask.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def hello_world():
    return 'Hello World!'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()

middle.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

print ("Content-Type: text/html")
print()

import requests
#response = requests.get("http://localhost:5000")
response = requests.get("http://localhost:8888/token=8a387fe88d662e2568f9b8ec2398191452492e7184536670")

print(response.text)

Answer 1

Your Python project is a reverse proxy, and the API you're looking for is just ordinary HTTP. (After all, that's how web browsers interact with Apache already...)

To make HTTP requests, you need a client like urllib or requests:

import requests

response = requests.get("http://" + apache_host + ":8080/" + parsed_path)

By default, all your apps and microservers will think that all clients come from localhost. If that's a problem, see if your apps accept the X-Forwarded-For header. (If they do, include it in all your requests.)