PEX Recipes and Notes

Gunicorn and PEX

Normally, to run a wsgi-compatible application with Gunicorn, you’d just point Gunicorn at your application, tell Gunicorn how to run it, and you’re ready to go - but if your application is shipping as a PEX file, you’ll have to bundle Gunicorn as a dependency and set Gunicorn as your entry point. Gunicorn can’t enter a PEX file to retrieve the wsgi instance, but that doesn’t prevent the PEX from invoking Gunicorn.

This retains the benefit of zero pip install’s to run your service, but it requires a bit more setup as you must ensure Gunicorn is packaged as a dependency. The following snippets assume Flask as the wsgi framework, Django setup should be similar:

$ pex flask gunicorn myapp -c gunicorn -o ~/service.pex

Once your pex file is created, you need to make sure to pass your wsgi app instance name to the CLI at runtime for Gunicorn to know how to hook into it, configuration can be passed in the same way:

$ service.pex myapp:appinstance -c /path/to/gunicorn_config.py

And there you have it, a fully portable python web service.