🚀 OxiServer: The Polyglot Python Web Engine

Write Python once. Deploy it anywhere. At full speed.

OxiServer is a high-performance, polyglot web ecosystem for serving Python applications. It allows you to ship the exact same OxiApp codebase to a 1.45 GB/sec C++ engine, a fast Julia engine, or a pure Python fallback — with zero code changes.

It's not just another ASGI framework. It's a unified server that serves static assets at wire speed, runs CGI and PHP natively, hosts ASGI/WSGI apps, and speaks the ASGI Lifespan protocol flawlessly across three different runtimes.

🌍 The Oxi Ecosystem

Most frameworks lock you into a single runtime. Oxi doesn't. You write your app using standard ASGI/WSGI, and choose your engine at deploy time:

All three engines:

• ✅ Speak ASGI 3.0 and WSGI.
• ✅ Serve static assets and directory listings.
• ✅ Execute CGI and PHP out of the box.
• ✅ Support the ASGI Lifespan protocol.
• ✅ Run OxiApp, Starlette, FastAPI, Flask, or Django.

⚡ Quickstart

1. Installation

The standard installation gives you the complete OxiServer Python suite:

• The OxiApp framework (app.py).
• The Python ASGI/WSGI server (server.py).
• The Julia ASGI/WSGI server (server.jl).
• The C++ source code (src/, Makefile), ready to be compiled for maximum performance.

# Standard install (pure Python asyncio)
pip install oxi

# High-performance install (adds uvloop for faster asyncio)
pip install "oxi[uvloop]"

🚀 Enabling the C++ Engine (Optional)
To achieve maximum throughput (over 1.4 GB/sec for static assets), you need to compile the bundled C++ engine. If you have a C++23-compatible compiler installed, this takes just a few seconds:
# Compile the C++ binary
oxibuild

# Eventually, cloning the repo is another option.
git clone https://github.com/sandy98/oxi.git
cd oxi
make

🌍 Run the same app on any engine

⚙️ Features

The C++ Engine (server)

• Zero-copy static serving via sendfile().
• Embedded CPython 3.10 +: C++ handles the sockets and HTTP parsing, while Python handles the ASGI/WSGI logic.
• True Lifespan : App on_startup hooks block C++ socket binding until they complete. App on_shutdown hooks are guaranteed to fire on Ctrl+C.
• Process Isolation : CGI scripts spawn in their own process groups with strict timeout and memory boundaries.

The Framework (OxiApp)

Built on top of the battle-tested TinA framework (Tiny Asynchronous).

• Flask-like routing : @app.get("/"), @app.post("/").
• Built-in Sessions & Templating .
• App Mounting : app.mount(flask_app, "/admin") seamlessly integrates WSGI apps inside your ASGI app.
• Full Lifespan Decorators :

from oxi.app import OxiApp

app = OxiApp("My API")

@app.on_startup async def connect_db(): print("🚀 Connecting to database...")

@app.get("/") async def index(): return "Hello from OxiApp!"

CGI & PHP (Out of the box)

Drop a .py, .sh, .pl, .rb, .java, or .php file into static/cgi-bin/. OxiServer detects it, spawns the interpreter safely, and parses the CGI Status: headers natively.

• No mod_cgi configuration.
• No php-fpm setup.

📺 Native Video Streaming

OxiServer is fully RFC 7233 compliant. It supports HTTP Range requests natively in C++, enabling seamless video seeking and streaming in browsers, VLC, and native media players without dropping connections or exhausting memory.

📊 Benchmarks

Tested on Linux x86_64, serving a 676 KB JPEG file with wrk -t4 -c100 -d30s:

Note: The C++ engine remains fully responsive to new connections even while under 100% load, and shuts down cleanly in < 50ms without dropping active requests.

🏗️ Architecture (Under the Hood)

OxiServer is a three-tier system. When a request arrives:

1. C++ Fast Path : Checks if the request is a static file or a CGI script. If so, it handles it entirely in C++ using sendfile or posix_spawn().
2. Python Offload : If the request is dynamic (an ASGI/WSGI route), C++ hands the raw socket file descriptor to the embedded CPython event loop via asyncio.
3. Zero-Copy Bridge : The Python app reads/writes directly to the socket, completely bypassing the C++ HTTP layer once the handoff is complete.

This hybrid approach means you get the raw network speed of C++ for static files, and the ecosystem of Python for dynamic logic.

🛠️ Configuration

Customize OxiServer in __about__.py:

config = { "static_dir": "static", "cgi_dir": "cgi-bin", "index_files": ["index.html", "index.htm", "index.php"], "allow_dirlisting": True, "allow_cgi": True, "max_body_size": 10 * 1024 * 1024, # 10 MB limit for CGI requests }

🗺️ Roadmap

• **☑ **C++ Engine with Lifespan & CGI
• **☑ **Julia Engine with Unix Socket IPC
• **☑ **Python Standalone Engine
• **☑ **ASGI 3.0 & WebSockets
• **☑ **WSGI Adapter (Flask/Django support)
• **□ **HTTP/2 support (coming soon)
• **□ **Multi-worker mode for C++
• **□ **Prometheus metrics endpoint

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

OxiServer is the evolution of the TinA framework. To the original TinA users: thank you for the years of production reliability. Welcome to Oxi.