By CherryPy Team

Your applications will obviously handle more than a single URL. Let’s imagine you have an application that generates a random string each time it is called:

import random
import string

import cherrypy


class StringGenerator(object):
    @cherrypy.expose
    def index(self):
        return "Hello world!"

    @cherrypy.expose
    def generate(self):
        return ''.join(random.sample(string.hexdigits, 8))


if __name__ == '__main__':
    cherrypy.quickstart(StringGenerator())

Save this into a file named app.py and run it as follows:

python3 app.py

Go now to http://localhost:8080/generate and your browser will display a random string. 

Let’s take a minute to decompose what’s happening here. This is the URL that you have typed into your browser: http://localhost:8080/generate 

This URL contains various parts:

• http:// which roughly indicates it’s a URL using the HTTP protocol (see RFC 2616). 
• localhost:8080 is the server’s address. It’s made of a hostname and a port. 
• /generate which is the path segment of the URL. This is what CherryPy uses to locate an exposed function or method to respond.

Here CherryPy uses the index( ) method to handle / and the generate( ) method to handle /generate