Querying a local XML-RPC server

If you do a lot of web programming, it's most likely that you will come across this task: to get some information from a website that runs an XML-RPC service. Before we go into the depth of an XML-RPC service, let's launch an XML-RPC server and talk to it first.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will use the Python Supervisor program that is widely used to launch and manage a bunch of executable programs. Supervisor can be run as a background daemon and can monitor child processes and restart if they die suddenly. We can install Supervisor by simply running the following command:

$pip install supervisor

Supervisor works on Python 2.x version - 2.4 and later. However, it does not work under Python 3 at the time of writing. So in order to run this example, you need to have Python 2 installed on your computer.

How to do it...

We need to create a configuration file for Supervisor. A sample configuration is given in this recipe. In this example, we define the Unix HTTP...