As I explore different ways of doing Web programming in Python via different Frameworks, I kept finding the need to examine HTTP server variables, specifically the server hostname, path, and query string. The method to do this varies quite a bit by framework.

Given the following URL: http://www.mydomain.com:8000/derp/test.py?name=Harry&occupation=Hit%20Man

I want to create the following variables with the following values:

• server_host is ‘www.mydomain.com’
• server_port is 8000
• path is ‘/derp/test.py’
• query_params is this dictionary: {‘name’: ‘Harry’, ‘occupation’: ‘Hit Man’}

Old School CGI

cgi.FieldStorage() is the easy way to do this, but it returns a list of tuples, and must be converted to a dictionary.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

if __name__ == "__main__":

    import os, cgi

    server_host = os.environ.get('HTTP_HOST', 'localhost')
    server_port = os.environ.get('SERVER_PORT', 80)
    path = os.environ.get('SCRIPT_URL', '/')
    query_params = {}
    _ = cgi.FieldStorage()
    for key in _:
        query_params[key] = str(_[key].value)

Note this will convert all values to strings. By default, cgi.FieldStorage() create numberic values as int or float.

WSGI

Similar to CGI, but environment variables get passed simply in a dictionary as the first parameter. There is no need to load the os module.

def application(environ, start_response):

    from urllib import parse

    server_host = environ.get('HTTP_HOST', 'localhost')
    server_port = environ.get('SERVER_PORT', 80)
    path = environ.get('SCRIPT_URL', '/')
    query_params = {}
    if '?' in environ.get('REQUEST_URI', '/'):
        query_params = dict(parse.parse_qsl(parse.urlsplit(environ['REQUEST_URI']).query))

Since the CGI Headers don’t exist, urllib.parse can be used to analyze the REQUEST_URI environment variable in order to form the dictionary.

Flask

Flask makes this very easy. The only real trick comes with path; the ‘/’ gets removed, so it must be re-added

from flask import Flask, request

app = Flask(__name__)

# Route all possible paths here
@app.route("/", defaults={"path": ""})
@app.route('/<string:path>')
@app.route("/<path:path>")

def index(path):
      
    [server_host, server_port] = request.host.split(':')
    path =  "/" + path
    query_params = request.args
 

FastAPI

This one’s a slightly different because the main variable to examine actually a QueryParams object with is a form of MultiDict

from fastapi import FastAPI, Request

app = FastAPI()

# Route all possible paths here
@app.get("/")
@app.get("/{path:path}")
def root(path, req: Request):

    [server_host, server_port] = req.headers['host'].split(':')
    path = "/" + path
    query_params = dict(req.query_params)

AWS Lambda

Lambda presents a dictionary called ‘event’ to the handler and it’s simply a matter of grabbing the right keys:

def lambda_handler(event, context):

    server_host = event['headers']['host']
    server_port = event['headers']['X-Forwarded-Port']
    path = event['path']
    query_params = event['queryStringParameters']

If multiValueheaders are enabled, some of the variables come in as lists, which in turn may have a list as values, even if there’s only one item.

    server_host = event['multiValueHeaders']['host'][0]
    query_params = {}
    for _ in event["multiValueQueryStringParameters"].items():
        query_params[_[0]] = _[1][0]