在网站上运行 Python 脚本（在后台）

Question

Firstly, apologies for the very basic question. I have looked into other answers but they haven't quite answered what I'm after. I'm confident designing a site in HTML/CSS and have very very basic knowledge of Python.

I want to run a very basic Python script on my website. It analyses tweets about a specific topic, and then posts a sentiment analysis score. I want it to run this sentiment analysis every hour and cache the score.

I have a working Python script which does this in Jupyter Notebook. Could you give me an overview of how I would make this script function online and cache the results? I've read into using Python web frameworks, but from my limited understanding, they seem like overkill?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

Could you give me an overview of how I would make this script function online

The key thing would be to uncouple the two parts of your system:

• Producing the data
• Showing it in a website.

So the first thing to do is have your sentiment-analysis script push its value to a database. The database could be something as simple as a csv file, or it could be a key/value store, or something like MySQL or CouchDB (or hundreds of other choices).

Over on the website you have to make a decision between:

• Server-side
• Client-side

If the former, you could program in Python if that is what you are most familiar with. Whatever language/framework combination you go for, there will an example tutorial of how to read a value from a database and display it: it is just about the most fundamental thing.

If client-side you will usually be programming in JavaScript. Again you need to choose a framework, but again you should easily be able to find a tutorial to follow.

(Unless you have a good reason to prefer server-side, such as familiarity with an existing framework, or security issues with accessing your database, I'd go with a client-side approach.)

I've read into using Python web frameworks... overkill?

Yes and no. You are going to need some kind of database, and some kind of framework. It would be good to understand the basics of web security, too. If the sentiment analysis is your major goal, all that is going to be a distraction, and it might be better to find a friend who already knows web programming to work with. Or just find a tutorial that is very close to what you want to do, and adapt that.

(PS I was going to flag your question as "too broad", but you did ask for an overview, so I hope this helps.)