Download websites that use mod_python

About mod_python

Occasionally a technology's distribution map explains it better than its documentation does. Nothing about an Apache module that runs Python inside the web server is national. A concentration of that kind is the signature of a hosting industry rather than of a language community.

The explanation is a stock server image. Shared hosting providers build one standard configuration and deploy it across every account they sell, so a module compiled into that image turns up on every site the provider hosts, whether the site uses Python or not. What we are looking at is largely the customer base of a handful of hosting companies in one market, not a roll call of teams who chose to deploy Python this way.

History matters for reading the population correctly. Released in 2002, written in C and licensed under Apache 2.0, the module embedded a Python interpreter directly in the server at a time when the alternative was starting a fresh process for every request. The approach was later displaced by gateway interface conventions and the dedicated application servers built around them, and the project itself stopped issuing releases long ago. Nothing in this population is a current architectural decision. Every remaining installation is inherited.

The version spread supports that reading. We record 10 distinct releases clustered around 3.5.0, which is narrow for a component with such a long history, and narrowness of that kind is what a small number of provider images looks like when each one was frozen at whatever release was current on the day it was built.

Detection is inferential and understates the real footprint. We identify the module when a server advertises it in its banner, and a great many servers say nothing about their modules, sit behind a proxy or a content delivery network that rewrites the banner, or run the module without ever announcing it. The published set is the visible subset, which is a fair basis for comparing providers and a floor rather than a total for anyone counting.

The distinction is exactly why the export beats a lookup. An unmaintained server module reachable from the public internet is a security question, a modernisation opportunity and a competitive intelligence item at once, and none of those can be settled one domain at a time. Security teams want every visible instance, managed hosting and migration vendors want the accounts still sitting on a dead stack, and analysts want to know which providers are carrying them. The downloadable list gives the whole set with country, domain zone, version and neighbouring technologies attached, which is the shape the question actually has.