[patch] Allow manage.py runserver to use service names as well as port numbers

[mail@…]

This patch allows a named service to be passed to manage.py runserver instead of a port number.

e.g. if /etc/services contains the line

dummy     12345/tcp

then you can run:

manage.py runserver dummy

to start the server on port 12345.

[Adrian Holovaty]

Do people typically know port service names, or is this too much of a special case?

[Fraser Nevett <mail@…>]

I agree this is probably a special case.

This came about because we have a shared development server, and thought it would be sensible to assign each developer with a port so they can each run their own instance of Django. In /etc/services we have a port for each developer's name; for example:

tom    9000/tcp
dick   9001/tcp
harry  9002/tcp

I'm not overly concerned if this gets included, but I believe the interchangeability of port numbers and service names is a pretty standard Linux/Unix feature so we might want to provide support for it. What do people think?

P.S. We've only tested that this works on Linux; not sure if/how Windows and other OSs support socket.getservbyname.

[Adrian Holovaty]

With that in mind, this seems like too much of a special case (and feature creep) for inclusion in Django.