Python http.server and BaseHTTPRequestHandler - Multi-endpoint API

Question

By doing python -m http.server you can invoke a simple web server which serves files in a directory.

My question is how I can use this to make multiple API endpoints with BaseHTTPRequestHandler

E.g. if I were to make a file called “helloworld.py” in the api directory, with this code:

from http.server import BaseHTTPRequestHandler

class app(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
    def do_GET(self):
        self.send_response(200)
        self.send_header(“Content-type”, “text/plain”)
        self.end_headers()
        self.wfile.write(b”Hello World”)
        return

And the visited http://localhost/api/helloworld it would display the text Hello World.

Is there a way to do this?

TL;DR How can you incorporate BaseHTTPRequestHandler functions into a http.server and execute them as backend handlers?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use regex to check self.path for the desired endpoint. It can be applied to do_POST as well.

import re
from http.server import BaseHTTPRequestHandler, HTTPServer

class app(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
  def do_GET(self):
    self.send_response(200)
    self.send_header('Content-type','text/html')
    self.end_headers()

    if re.search('/api/helloworld', self.path):
      message = "Hello, World"
      self.wfile.write(bytes(message, "utf8"))

with HTTPServer(('', 8000), app) as server:
  server.serve_forever()

python helloworld.py will run the server indefinitely, then

$ curl localhost:8000/api/helloworld                                                 
Hello, World%