Announcing ssweb: single-shot webserver in Python

This blog post announces ssweb, a single-shot HTTP server library in Python 2.x. Single-shot means is that the webserver accepts only a single incoming HTTP connection, handles it, and then exits immediately.

Such a server can be used as a redirect target in the web-based OAuth authentication protocol, to receive the freshly generated OAuth token. In this case the program is a command-line tool running a HTTP server for a short amount of time, to make the passwordsless login more convenient for the user, without having to manually copy-paste token. If it doesn't sound useful, then it's most probably not useful for you right now.

Example usage:

$ wget -O ssweb.py http://raw.githubusercontent.com/pts/ssweb/master/ssweb.py
$ python ssweb.py
URL: http://127.0.0.1:40464/foo
{'res_body': 'Shot.', 'req_head': 'GET /foo HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: 127.0.0.1:40464\r\nUser-Agent: Python-urllib/1.17\r\n\r\n', 'client_addr': ('127.0.0.1', 40026), 'res_head': 'HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\nContent-Type: text/plain\r\nContent-Length: 5\r\n\r\n', 'req_body': ''}
'Shot.'
$ python ssweb.py x
Please visit URL: http://127.0.0.1:59872/foo
... (after visiting the URL in Firefox)
{'res_body': 'Shot.', 'req_head': 'GET /foo HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: 127.0.0.1:59872\r\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:28.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/28.0\r\nAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\r\nAccept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflate\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\n\r\n', 'client_addr': ('127.0.0.1', 50702), 'res_head': 'HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\nContent-Type: text/plain\r\nContent-Length: 5\r\n\r\n', 'req_body': ''}