Why is my Python script giving me an error every time it runs?

Question

I checked the server logs and I can't seem to find anything that explains why it's doing this. Every time I load the page I get a "500 Internal Server Error" message. All I'm trying to do is update a JSON file.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import cgi
import json

new_data = {"2": {"title": "what", "date": "tomorrow"}}

with open("jobs.json") as file:
    data = json.load(file)

data.update(new_data)

with open('test.json', 'w') as file:
    json.dump(data, file)

Answer 1

You need to send some content type header first before sending anything, from Apache's docs :

There are two main differences between ``regular'' programming, and CGI programming.

First, all output from your CGI program must be preceded by a MIME-type header . This is HTTP header that tells the client what sort of content it is receiving. Most of the time, this will look like:

 Content-type: text/html 

so it would be something like:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import cgi
import json
import sys

new_data = {"2": {"title": "what", "date": "tomorrow"}}

# print "Content-type: application/json\r\n\r\n" to the output stream
sys.stdout.write("Content-type: application/json\r\n\r\n") # read the comment

with open("jobs.json") as file:
    data = json.load(file)

data.update(new_data)

with open('test.json', 'w') as file:
    json.dump(data, file)

also check that path to these files and that you write to a writable directory.