Üllar Seerme

You can make documentation fun to read

January 19, 2022

If nothing else this is a small note of praise to the people who have written the documentation for the uWSGI project. I went through the quickstart for Python/WSGI applications and just that page already has more bits that made me smirk than any documentation page in recent memory. Here are some of them (citations mine):

uWSGI natively speaks HTTP, FastCGI, SCGI and its specific protocol named “uwsgi” (yes, wrong naming choice).

If you are thinking about firing up vi and writing an init.d script for spawning uWSGI, just sit (and calm) down and make sure your system doesn’t offer a better (more modern) approach first.

uwsgi --socket 127.0.0.1:3031 --chdir /home/foobar/myproject/ --wsgi-file myproject/wsgi.py --master --processes 4 --threads 2 --stats 127.0.0.1:9191

Argh! What the hell is this?! Yes, you’re right, you’re right… dealing with such long command lines is unpractical, foolish and error-prone. Never fear! uWSGI supports various configuration styles.

A common problem with webapp deployment is “stuck requests”. All of your threads/workers are stuck (blocked on request) and your app cannot accept more requests. To avoid that problem you can set a harakiri1 timer.

You should already be able to go into production with such few concepts, but uWSGI is an enormous project with hundreds of features and configurations. If you want to be a better sysadmin, continue reading the full docs.

Sure, it’s possible to go overboard with humor to the point of distraction, but some amount is definitely welcome as it removes the tinge of seriousness from a project making it seem more accessible where it otherwise might not be. Hopefully I come across more examples of taking the mickey out of documentation.

Footnotes

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku

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