I'm building a local web page to control a desk fan with two buttons and a speed slider. The browser-side controls and event handlers are working, but I need to send the slider's current value to a Python script that controls the motor. What's the best way to connect the JavaScript page and the Python process? I'm currently serving the static page through Nginx in a container and was wondering whether this is an inter-process communication problem.
1 Answer
The usual approach is to run the Python code as a small local web server or API. Your JavaScript can send the slider value to an endpoint with `fetch()`, for example using a `POST` request containing JSON. The Python server receives that value, validates it, and updates the motor. Nginx can continue serving the static HTML and JavaScript; it doesn’t mean you need two copies of the web app. You’d simply have one static frontend and a separate Python backend process that exposes an API.
So the Python process would provide the API endpoint, while Nginx only serves the page? That clears up the distinction—I was interpreting “web server” as another copy of the whole application.