Passing webpage form data to Python script on my location machine

Question

I have a Python script that I have written that an utilizes an API to retrieve weather information, its just a simple terminal print script for right now. I am starting to learn more about HTML/JS and am wondering where I could start to learn how to pass information from my web pages to scripts.

Eventually what I am trying to work towards is passing a zip code string input from an HTML form over to my Python script on my local machine, and then have the script return data to my webpage.

The problem is, I have no idea where to start, or where even to start looking for information. For example, I understand that you can pass values to a server side application & that is kinda what I'm simulating here.

Answer 1

If you want to run your python script from your websites, you could use a server for that. Given that you are already into Javascript, I suggest that you create a server using a popular JS framework called Express. Express is designed for NodeJS, a JS runtime.

Once you setup your Express server, you can start creating routes and integrate them into your websites by making asynchronous calls with utilities like fetch or axios. For example, you can create a sample app like this:

var express = require('express');
var app = express();

app.get('/', function (req, res) {
  res.send('Hello World!');
});

app.use('/run-script', function (req, res) {
  res.send('Script run!');
};

app.listen(3000, function () {
  console.log('Example app listening on port 3000!');
});

If you look closer, app.use() allows you to define routes. When a user or a JS script calls this route, the function gets executed. For example, inside the route run-script you could execute yours:

app.use('/run-script', function(){
  const spawn = require("child_process").spawn;
  const pythonProcess = spawn('python',["path/to/script.py", arg1, arg2, ...]);
});

As you see, there are numerous possibilities. For more info on calling python scripts from node, see this stackoverflow question. You could start digging into NodeJS in general. For that, a good place to start is the official guides.

Please let me know if this answer was useful to you.