# WSGIRestrictStdout

Description: | Enable restrictions on use of STDOUT.
Syntax: | `WSGIRestrictStdout On|Off`
Default: | `WSGIRestrictStdout On`
Context: | server config

A well behaved Python WSGI application should never attempt to write any data directly to `sys.stdout` or use the `print` statement without directing it to an alternate file object. This is because ways of hosting WSGI applications such as CGI use standard output as the mechanism for sending the content of a response back to the web server. If a WSGI application were to directly write to `sys.stdout` it could interfere with the operation of the WSGI adapter and result in corruption of the output stream.

In the interests of promoting portability of WSGI applications, mod_wsgi restricts access to `sys.stdout` and will raise an exception if an attempt is made to use `sys.stdout` explicitly.

The only time that one might want to remove this restriction is purely out of convencience of being able to use the `print` statement during debugging of an application, or if some third party module or WSGI application was errornously using `print` when it shouldn’t. If restrictions on using `sys.stdout` are removed, any data written to it will instead be sent through to `sys.stderr` and will appear in the Apache error log file.