home     documentation     download

A nice feature of Spyce is that it can be invoked both from within a web server to process a web request dynamically and also from the command-line. The processing engine itself is the same in both cases. The command-line option is actually just a modified CGI client, and is often used to pre-process static content, such as this manual.

Some remarks regarding command-line execution specifics are in order. The request and response objects for a command-line request are connected to standard input and output, as expected. A minimal CGI-like environment is created among the other shell environment variables. Header and cookie lookups will return None and the engine will accept input on stdin for POST information, if requested. There is also no compiler cache, since the process memory is lost at the end of every execution.

Most commonly, Spyce is invoked from the command-line to generate static .html ouput. Spyce then becomes a rather handy and powerful .html preprocessing tool. It was used on this documentation to produce the consistent headers and footers, to include and highlight the example code snippets, etc...

The following makefile rule comes in handy:

  %.html: %.spy
    spyce -o $@ $<