Python CGI Debugging howto: Part 2

Ok, in the previous post I wrote that probably there was a better way to display errors for cgi script in python, so, here it is:

import cgitb
cgitb.enable() #This enable it all

Two lines :)

Simply put them at the beginning of a script and they do all the work. It's also possible to output errors in a log file instead of displaying them in the browser of the user (just take a look at python documentation on cgitb.enable()), a far better solution for production environment.

Python CGI Debugging howto

I found this useful when you are trying to debug a python script running on a remote server (that has a previous version of python, in my case :( ).

To show the classic interpreter error messages just do this:

import sys
sys.stderr = sys.stdout

print "Content-type: text/html\n"

In this way, we set the errors to output text on the standard output (in other words, we redirect the errors to the standard output), then we print the standard HTTP header to inform the browser that the following text will be an HTML page (even text/plain works fine) and if we get an error, it will be in some part of the page source :D.

Simple, probably not the best, but it works.