Sep 7, 2022 by glenn

Updated on 25 August 2022 (US) and 9 August 2022 (EU)!

Here is a slightly delayed (and short) run-down of the new stuff that we deployed recently.

The main addition for this update is a new system image. It’s name is “haggis” and it has Python 3.10! There are also a number of new Python packages installed. See our batteries included page for a full list. There are also many new system libraries installed. You can learn about system images and how to change yours here.

We have also:

• Updated Jupyter notebooks - updated notebooks are only available when you are running the new “haggis” system image
• Fixed a number of security issues
• Fixed various bugs

Aug 26, 2022 by giles

Managing fraud and abuse of free products is a challenge that nearly every SaaS company contends with, but too often the perceived solution is to simply end free accounts. We’ve seen this happen time and again across the open-source ecosystem, most recently from Heroku, and we fear this comes at the detriment of the community.

We believe we’ve found a better way to solve this problem and are therefore committed to maintaining free PythonAnywhere accounts for the foreseeable future. Yes, this does cost us money and we do need to handle fraud and abuse, but over the 10 years we’ve been running we’ve found that the benefits to the community and to the service itself outweigh the costs.

Aug 3, 2022 by pythonanywhere

As you probably already know, PythonAnywhere is now part of the Anaconda family! As we expected Anaconda’s investment in PythonAnywhere will allow us to expand and improve to better serve our users. So we’re starting to grow our team, and first time since 2014 we’re officially hiring! If you are an experienced frontend developer who wants to get their feet wet with the backend stuff, we might be looking for you.

Jun 22, 2022 by anaconda

In June 2022, Anaconda announced its acquisition of PythonAnywhere. This acquisition expands Python team collaboration in the cloud and adds capabilities designed to unite teams and create access to more robust cloud resources. We’ve compiled the following list of frequently asked questions to aid users in navigating the transition. – Will this affect my PythonAnywhere account? For now, it won’t! There are no plans to change PythonAnywhere user accounts, and you can continue to use yours as usual without interruption.

Mar 16, 2022 by pythonanywhere

Last Wednesday, a security researcher working under our bug bounty program found a way that they could access one account’s file storage from another by using the “Dirty Pipe” Linux kernel vulnerability. We put a mitigation system in place to stop that from happening, and then on Thursday we were able to patch the underlying issue. On Friday, another researcher found a similar issue, which the mitigation system we’d put in place originally made relatively harmless – we were able to patch that one within minutes.

Feb 18, 2022 by pafk

The new release of the pythonanywhere helper scripts package introduces new commands covering our files API.

Nov 12, 2021 by giles

As of this week, websites hosted on PythonAnywhere using HTTPS will only be accessible using modern versions of TLS (the encryption protocol on which HTTPS is based) by default. This will make them all more secure.

We can still support older versions of TLS for custom domains if you need to support them, but you’ll need to get in touch with us to get it set up.

We’ve written a help page with the background – please let us know in the comments if there’s anything confusing there!

Oct 29, 2021 by fjl

Over the years, we’ve found that one regular source of confusion for people who are just getting started with web development is how to handle what we call “global state”. We’ve written a help page explaining how to solve problems like this and wanted to expand on it here.

Oct 20, 2021 by giles

On 6 October we upgraded our EU-based systems to the latest version of our platform, and today, 20 October, we did the same upgrade on our US-based system. There are a bunch of changes to report!

Sep 30, 2021 by pafk

This post is intended for users who begin their adventure with web applications. You’ll find below how to structure a web app that relies on heavy processing of the input data – processing that takes so long that you can’t do it inside a request handler with a five-minute timeout, or at least so long that you don’t want to risk slowing down your website by doing it inside the website’s own code. You want it to happen in the background. You’ll see an example implementing some hints from the “Async work in Web apps” help page, which involve writing a jQuery script polling simple API endpoint communicating with a database updated by an external script (so there will be some sqlalchemy stuff too).