I wanted to bash a couple of ideas together and see how quickly I could get something serving data from mongodb over https. I’d just started messing with python and the pymongo driver and I was (and still am) loving the quick hit python coding gives. Adding bottle as a framework made it all webby and useful feeling into the bargain :-). What is not not to like?

What I really wanted was a sweet single point solution that bottle already gave me, but with https. Past self takes over at this point….

After a bunch of digging around and reading lots of blurb, the upshot is a lightweight https server called CherryPy using bottle querying a mongodb using a regex and outputting whatever is in the first result to the screen, with a list of some of the other results, allowing the user to refine their search. The app is mickey mouse, and you do have a post where I’d prefer a redirect and using a cookie (so that browser refreshes work nicely), but the amount of data you can potentially return using the re would blow out the cookie size pretty quickly. There’s a probably a better way(tm) 😉

To do a test run you will need:

• mongod running
• If you want it not to throw a wobbler (I haven’t put much exception handling in it), you’ll need at least one row in testbottle.trades collection with at least one attribute of ‘Trade_Id’.
  So create a test db and record or two to play with. Start mongo shell and add some:

  use testbottle
  
  //bung one in with an easy one match re to remember
  db.trades.insert(
  	{
  		"Trade_Id" : "000457390G-1",
  		"Version_Number" : 1,
  		"Notes" : "",
  		"Settlement_Consideration" : 1721.72
  	}
  )
  
  //let us bung a small shedload in starting with x
  for (var i = 0; i < 1000; i+=1) { 
  	db.trades.insert(
  		{
  		"Trade_Id" : "x" + i, 
  		Version_Number : i, 
  		Settlement_Consideration : Math.random() * i * 100
  		}
  	)
  };
  			
  		

• python installed
• pip install pymongo – OR if on windows – http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pymongo use the windows msi
• pip install bottle
• pip install cherrypy
• pip install pyOpenSSL – OR if on windows – http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyOpenSSL use the windows msi
• Create a top level folder for this project. I used pyMongoBottlePoc
• create your own ssl cert –

  openssl req -new -x509 -keyout testserver.pem -out testserver.pem -days 365 -nodes

  Put this in your project top level folder.

• The find_trade.py code is here. Put this in your project top level directory
• The hello page and show found pages are here. Put these in “views” subdirectory
• Run it by typing at the command line

  python find_trade.py

• Use it by pointing your web browser at

  https://localhost:8082/

find_trade.py is a webserver on your localhost port 8082 which initially shows a welcome page hello_get_value.tpl asking you to input a trade id. When you click submit, find_trades.py does a regex search in the mongo database returns a cursor (trades) and the first result (trade). Bottle renders them using show_trade.tpl.

I leaned really heavily on this post from Diego XA and on the 10Gen Dev course youtube videos week 1 which have an excellent intro to python course in them. Thanks guys.