IronPython Web Roles for Windows Azure

Following up to my previous post on IronPython worker roles, I'm going to discuss how to implement web roles using IronPython. The code discussed here is on bitbucket, as usual.

There are currently two ways to implement IronPython web roles on Azure: using the ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support or using NWSGI. Someday I hope the IronRubyMVC project matures to be an option as well.

Using ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support

This example can be found in the PyWebRole folder of the project.

First, you'll need to download the ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support (ASP.NET DLS) files. Next, create a standard C# web role and delete all of the .cs files except WebRole.cs. After that, there's really not much to it – drop the assemblies from the ASP.NET DLS package into the project's bin folder and add the following bits to the web.config file (alternatively, just copy the Web.config from the project):

<configSections>
    <!-- Add this to the existing <configSections> element -->
    <section name="microsoft.scripting" type="Microsoft.Scripting.Hosting.Configuration.Section, Microsoft.Scripting, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" requirePermission="false"/>
</configSections>

<system.web>
    <!-- Replace the existing <pages> element (if any) -->
    <pages compilationMode="Auto" pageParserFilterType="Microsoft.Web.Scripting.UI.NoCompileCodePageParserFilter" pageBaseType="Microsoft.Web.Scripting.UI.ScriptPage" userControlBaseType="Microsoft.Web.Scripting.UI.ScriptUserControl">
        <controls>
            <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
            <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI.WebControls" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
        </controls>
    </pages>
</system.web>

<system.webserver>
    <modules>
        <!-- Add this to the existing <modules> element -->
        <add name="DynamicLanguageHttpModule" preCondition="integratedMode" type="Microsoft.Web.Scripting.DynamicLanguageHttpModule"/>
    </modules>
</system.webserver>

<!-- Add this whole section -->
<microsoft.scripting debugMode="true">
    <languages>
        <language names="IronPython;Python;py" extensions=".py" displayName="IronPython 2.6" type="IronPython.Runtime.PythonContext, IronPython, Version=2.6.10920.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
    </languages>
</microsoft.scripting>

From here, just follow the directions on the ASP.NET DLS page and in the package to create an ASP.NET Dynamic Language site.

NWSGI

First, download NWSGI 2.0. Next, deploying NWSGI to Azure is exactly the same as deploying it to any other server using xcopy. That's about it. You can see this example in the PyHelloWorld folder of the project.

Now What?

Unfortunately, now you're pretty much on your own. So far, none of the big Python web frameworks work 100% on IronPython, there is no Python library to access Azure's storage tables, blobs, or queues, and the .NET storage client library relies on LINQ support (which IronPython doesn't have, yet).

Personally, I plan to implement the data access in C# and call that from IronPython, running my own web framework. We'll see how it goes.