web2py Rocket support for python 3.6+

Rick Williams

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Jan 27, 2020, 5:23:42 PM1/27/20

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Can anyone comment on the ongoing support for Rocket web server (with SSL/Https) with Web2py?

My environment is RHEL Linux 7. I've been running on python 2.7.x for long time. I recently moved an app to python 3.6.3 ( I use Red Hat SCL rh-python35 and rh-python36) and ran into some times when web2py would hang and require restart to begin serving users again. I then switched to python 3.5.1 and have had much better reliability. But I do want to move forward with 3.6.

Since then, I've tried a little searching around and it seems Rocket may not be getting a lot of support from maintainers. ( i.e. https://github.com/explorigin/Rocket/issues/10 ).

Would anyone like to comment about the future of Rocket, please ?

Regards,

Rick.

Massimo Di Pierro

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Jan 30, 2020, 1:38:37 AM1/30/20

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Rocket has a history. It was a rewrite on an early web server that I wrote, borring some ideas from cherrypi. It became its own project. When the maintainers lost interests I forked and the version that ships with web2py is not the one in github/lunchpad. I will continue to maintain it as long as issues are filed web2py issues. If it becomes nu-manteinable we can also switch it. I do not see problems at the moment. Rocket has been pretty solid.

Rick Williams

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Jan 30, 2020, 9:18:08 AM1/30/20

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Hi Massimo,

I appreciate the response. I agree, I've found web2py with rocket to be very stable for us. I want to continue to use it because it provides a nice, simple setup for our internal apps. The problems I see are related to scans our security team runs. Those scans try to check for known issues and such and sometimes will act in a way that is antagonistic. I suspect the error handling somewhere in the stack is not robust enough and results in a hang. I encountered this some time ago with an older python 2.7 but since our system has been patched ( normal monthly RHEL patches by admin team) over time the problem stopped. I've found that running with rh-python35 our apps can also endure through the scans. There will be some SSL and rocket error messages but the web2py app continues to function. However, with rh-python36 (it's 3.6.9, right now) the hang condition will persist.

Do you think this sort of problem warrants some kind of investigation or problem submission against web2py? Or is it something where I should wait on the next rh-python36 or newer and try again?

One last thing, is there a way to configure Rocket to limit the TLS support for SSL to TLS1.2?

Regards,

Rick

Massimo Di Pierro

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Jan 31, 2020, 4:55:35 AM1/31/20

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Please submit a bug report with more details. We will look into it. If you can help fix this it would be great as looks like you have some resources to dedicated to improve rocket.