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 On Friday, another researcher found a similar issue, which the mitigation system we’d put in place originally made relatively harmless – we were able to patch that one within minutes.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).

Aug 5, 2021 by giles

Ten years ago today, on the blog for Project Dirigible, we announced that we’d recently launched a new site called PythonAnywhere. It almost didn’t happen! The project we were working on was something completely different, and it was only when we looked at how it was being used that we realised that it held the seed of a much better idea.

Project Dirigible was an online spreadsheet, based on Python. Unlike a traditional spreadsheet, where cells can hold only numbers, dates and text, it supported any Python type, so a cell could contain a list, an object, a numpy array, or even a function (so, if you don’t value your sanity very highly, you could write a formula like this: =A1(A2.value, A3[6], A4(A5))).

We’d been hoping that Dirigible would be the breakout success that Resolver One, our desktop Pythonic spreadsheet, had never been, and would help us free the world from the tyranny of Excel. It was getting some interest, with a reasonable number of people signing up and using it, but we’d discovered something odd:

When we asked Dirigible’s beta testers what they were using it for, a surprising number said that it was for general Python development online. They weren’t using the spreadsheet grid at all!

In retrospect, perhaps it shouldn’t have been so surprising. People want to write Python code, and sometimes they don’t have a computer with it installed to hand – and it’s always useful to have your code accessible so that you can work from anywhere. Programmers have flexibility in the tools they use and can relatively easily move to a new system. By contrast, spreadsheet users have a lot of existing documents that they want to keep, and many of them are far from being technical people. They really don’t want to move to something new.

So, we started PythonAnywhere. Here’s a potted history of what happened next.

Jun 30, 2021 by giles

If you signed up for an account on PythonAnywhere after 21 June 2021, you’ll have Python 3.9 available – you can use it just like any other Python version. Additionally, the underlying operating system for your account will be Ubuntu 20.04, rather than the 16.04 used by older accounts.

If you signed up before that date, you’ll be on an older “system image” – essentially the version of the operating system and the set of installed packages that you have access to. You can switch to the new system image from the “Account” page, but you may need to make changes to your code and/or virtualenvs to make everything work – there’s more information on the linked page.

This post has more details on what’s new in the glastonbury system image. There’s a lot!