reStructuredText server

reStructuredText basic server in Python

what is it

A very simple server which transforms ReST (reStructuredText) files to HTML on the fly. Errors during transformation will be sent to the browser too, so it is IMHO a quite useful development tool for ReST files. A "site" being build this way may also be published as static HTML with a simple converter script.

Inital version inspired by the Twisted reStructuredText Server from the ActiveState Cookbook site but working on a basic Python installation using the included SimpleHTTPServer . You may want to look there for improvements like caching though.

known limitations

The generated XHTML files should ideally be sent with mime-type application/xhtml+xml but as Docutils currently adds <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> the Content-Type header text/html is currently sent by the server too.

license

This module has been placed in the public domain. (New license from v2.0)

download

restserver-2.0.zip 070911
( restserver.py v1.3 060111 - replace .txt with .py extension (very simple script version))

Tested with Python 2.5.1 and Docutils 0.5 on Windows XP only. Needs Python 2.4, Docutils 0.5 and optionally lxml if you want to convert all files to a static HTML version.

usage

See the provided example and docutils.conf which should be pretty self explanatory.

change history

v2.0 070911

extended docutils configuration file
added full project with example CSS, Javascript (jQuery) etc.
added converter to static HTML
added HEAD in addition to GET method (e.g. if you like to access a file from the server and first want to check if it is present at all)
needs docutils 0.5 to be able to use a template
new licence

v1.3 060111

added txt2html.xsl which converts *.txt links to *.html
renamed RSTEXT to RST_EXT
if no path (or " / ") is given, "index." + RST_EXT is tried to prevent a maybe older index.html to be shown by default behaviour of SimpleHTTPServer

v1.2 050604

supports command line options same as those for rst2html.py with a patch from Felix Wiemann
added constand RSTEXT to configure extension for ReST files the server looks for
added license, for questions please contact me

v1.1 050531

requests for ".html" are now tested if a ".txt" file with same name exists. If yes it will redirect to the ".txt" (which will be converted to HTML again) - useful for testing and also packages like the docutils documentation package which uses html links but by default files are ".txt" only

v1.0 050521

first release