textual-serve

Textual serve turns your Textual app in to a web application.

Getting Started

First, install (or upgrade) Textual.

Then install textual-serve from Pypi:

pip install textual-serve

Creating a server

The API is super simple. First import the Server class:

from textual_serve.server import Server

Then create a server instance and pass the command that launches your Textual app:

server = Server("python -m textual")

The command can be anything you would enter in the shell, as long as it results in a Textual app running.

Finally, call the serve command:

server.server()

You will now be able to click on the link in the terminal to run your app in a browser.

Summary

Run this code, visit http://localhost:8000

from textual_serve.server import Server

server = Server("python -m textual")
server.serve()

Configuration

The Server class has the following parameters:

parameter	description
command	A shell command to launch a Textual app
host	The host of the web application (defaults to "localhost")
port	The port for the web application (defaults to 8000)
title	The title show in the web app on load, leave as `None` to use the command
public_url	The public URL, if the server is behind a proxy. `None` for the local URL
statics_path	Path to statics folder, relative to server.py. Default uses directory in module.
templates_path	Path to templates folder, relative to server.py. Default uses directory in module.

The Server.serve method accepts a debug parameter. When set to True, this will enable textual devtools.

How does it work?

When you visit the app URL, the server launches an instance of your app in a subprocess, and communicates with it via a websocket.

This means that you can serve multiple Textual apps across all the CPUs on your system.

Note that Textual-serve uses a custom protocol to communicate with Textual apps. It does not simply run a shell in your browser. This means that there is no way for a user of the app to do anything malicious.

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