Make More Responsive Web Applications with SocketIO and gevent

This is a companion repository for the PyCon 2013 talk with the above title:

• Slides
• Video: PyVideo, YouTube

Its purpose is to provide a proof of concept. The code provided here was written against Python 2.7, but it should work without issue on Python 2.6.

The primary, intended purpose of this repository is for it to be browsed ("how do I do that?"), but you can install and run it, too.

Dependencies

This package will depend on:

• libevent
• redis

...which you'll need to install on your own, either with your OS' package manager or manually.

You'll also need to install the Python packages listed in pip-requirements.txt, and the Python driver for your Django-supported database of choice.

Note: This will almost certainly not work in Windows of any flavor.

Redis

Note that this package does depend on Redis. Redis is not, by any means, necessary to build a SocketIO-based application, and indeed, this demonstration could work without it.

Adding Redis into the mix, however, makes it very straightforward to have something outside of our web stack issue the broadcast. Since many use cases will want to do this, it seems helpful to demonstrate it in this manner.

Setup

Setup from this point should be straightforward:

mkvirtualenv pycon2013_socketio --python=python2.7
workon pycon2013_socketio
git clone http://github.com/lukesneeringer/pycon2013-socketio.git
cd pycon2013-socketio/
pip install -r pip-requirements.txt

At this point, you'll need to do database setup:

• Install the Python database driver for your Django-supported database of choice.
• Create a database to house this project's tables.
• Set the appropriate environment variables so Django knows credentials; consult settings.py for these.

Once the database is ready:

./manage.py syncdb
./manage.py runserver

Then point your browser at http://localhost:8000/.