Welcome to Pyslet’s documentation!

Contents:

Compatibility

Pyslet requires Python 2.6 or Python 2.7, with Python 2.7 being preferred.

Python 2.6

When run under Python 2.6 Pyslet will patch the following modules to make them more compatible with Python 2.7 code.

zipfile
Patches is_zipfile to add support for passing open files which is allowed under Python 2.7 but not under 2.6.
wsgiref.simple_server
Modifies the behaviour of the WSGI server when procssing HEAD requests so that Content-Length headers are not stripped. There is an issue in Python 2.6 that causes HEAD requests to return a Content-Length of 0 if the WSGI application does not return any data. The behaviour changed in Python 2.7 to be more as expected.
io
Benign addition of the SEEK_* constants as defined in Python 2.7.

This patching is done at run time by the pyslet.py26 module and will affect any script that uses Pyslet. It does not modify your Python installation!

Earlier versions of Python 2.6 have typically been built with a version of sqlite3 that does not support validation of foreign key constraints, the unittests have been designed to skip these tests when such a version is encountered.

Note

When run under Python 2.6, Pyslet may not support certificate validation of HTTP connections properly, this seems to depend on the version of OpenSSL that Python is linked to. If you have successfully used pip to install Pyslet then your Python is probably unaffected though.

Please be aware of the following bug in Python 2.6: http://bugs.python.org/issue2531 this problem caused a number of Pyslet’s tests to fail initially and remains a potential source of problems if you are using Decimal types in OData models.

Python 3

Pyslet is not currently compatible with Python 3, though some work has been towards a Python 3 version.

PEP-8

The code is not currently PEP-8 compliant but it is slowly being refactored for compliance as modules are touched during development. Where critical methods are renamed from CamelCase to PEP-8 compliant lower_case_form then the old names are defined as wrappers which raise deprecation warnings.

Distribution

Pyslet is developed on github: https://github.com/swl10/pyslet but it can be downloaded and installed from the popular PyPi package distribution site: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyslet using pip.

Users of older Python builds (e.g., the current Python 2.6 installed on OS X as of August 2014) should be aware that pip may well fell to install itself or other modules due to a failure to connect to the PyPi repository. Fixing this is hard and installing from source is recommended instead if you are afflicted by this issue.

Pyslet is distributed under the ‘New’ BSD license: http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause

Installing from Source

The Pyslet package contains a setup.py script so you can install it by downloading the compressed archive, uncompressing it and then running the following command inside the package:

python setup.py install

Format of the Documentation

The documentation has been written using ReStructuredText, a simple format created as part of the docutils package on SourceForge. The documentation files you are most likely reading have been generated using Sphinx. Parts of the documentation are auto-generated from the Python source files to make it easier to automatically discover the documentation using other tools capable of reading Python docstrings. However, this requires that the docstrings be written using ReStructuredText too, which means there is some additional markup for python-cross referencing in the code that may not be interpretable by other system (see below for details).

Indices and tables