Tutorial¶
The tutorial consists of a bunch of progressively more complex
examples, showcasing more and more features as you go along. You
should have a decent working knowledge of Python and some idea of how
REST works. Some understanding of Twisted, particularly
twisted.web and the way it does object publishing probably,
wouldn’t hurt either; but that’s mostly important for more advanced
use cases.
The tutorial examples themselves are rpy files. These are
basically Python files that expose a resource. This way, we can run
the tutorials with minimal boilerplate. You might want to do something
more sophisticated in a real application, but that’s outside the scope
of this tutorial.
Each example starts with a short summary, followed by walking you through the documented example code. Finally, you can try the example out interactively.
Serving the tutorial examples¶
In order for the interactive examples to work, Twisted needs to be
serving the tutorial. There are two ways of doing that: using the
helper script, or invoking twistd manually. The former neatly
daemonizes twistd and cleans up the log file, but the latter makes
it a bit easier to see what’s going on under the hood in terms of HTTP
requests.
The helper script will only work on *nix-like environments. Windows
users should run twistd manually.
Using the helper script¶
From the docs directory:
./serveTutorial start
When you’re done:
./serveTutorial stop
Running twistd manually¶
Run following command from the txyoga base directory:
twistd -n web --path doc/tutorial
The -n flag makes twistd stay in the foreground instead of
daemonizing. The other arguments should be fairly
self-explanatory. You should see something similar to this:
2011-04-17 21:29:28+0200 [-] Log opened.
2011-04-17 21:29:28+0200 [-] twistd 11.0.0+r31557 (/usr/bin/python 2.7.1) starting up.
2011-04-17 21:29:28+0200 [-] reactor class: twisted.internet.selectreactor.SelectReactor.
2011-04-17 21:29:28+0200 [-] twisted.web.server.Site starting on 8080
2011-04-17 21:29:28+0200 [-] Starting factory <twisted.web.server.Site instance at 0x2e7f3b0>
As you can see, Twisted is listening for connections on port 8080.