Enable/Disable HAproxy Backend Servers via Python

Sometimes we may want to automatically enable/disable machines behind our HAproxy automatically (during a deploy or maintenance), this is how it's done via Python code. The idea is to use HAproxy Unix Socket based API.

Python - read configuration file

Consider the following configuration file which consists of section name and key values:

$ cat /opt/myapp/myapp.ini
[master]
host=host01
port=2181

The following code (myapp.py) will parse the configuration file extracting values by section + corresponding key:

#!/usr/bin/python
import ConfigParser
configParser = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser()
configFilePath = r'/opt/myapp/myapp.ini'
configParser.read(configFilePath)
myhost = configParser.get('master', 'host')
myport = configParser.get('master', 'port')
print "Checking host:"+myhost+",port:"+myport


Run:

$ ./myapp.py
checking host:host01,port:2181