Cherrypy + Routes with mod_wsgi

If you haven't played around with deploying your python apps using mod_wsgi, I highly recommend it. It is a very stable way to deploy your application that takes advantage of the good parts of the apache2 runtime.

Vanilla Cherrypy apps run great as wsgi applications. However, I did come across a problem when deploying a Cherrypy app with Routes. Running the application using the cherrypy server worked fine, but deploying it using apache2 + mod_wsgi always gave me the following on every request:

503 Service Unavailable

The CherryPy engine has stopped.

After some looking around the mod_wsgi project (which is well documented I must say) I found the answer here: http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/IntegrationWithCherryPy

When running a Cherrypy app with the routes dispatcher you need to make sure you call:

cherrypy.engine.start(blocking=False)

After mounting your app. This sets the cherrypy engine state to running. After doing this everything worked great and I now have beautiful restful routes in my mod_wsgi app.