Django Broken pipe in Debug mode

Question

I have django 1.3 on the remote server behind Nginx.

If I run django with apache + mod_wsgi, I can watch errors in apache log files. It's ok but I'd like to have in console.

If I run django own development server, I get errors with stacktrace in console only when DEBUG = False. In DEBUG mode console outputs

Exception happened during processing of request from (..., ...)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/python/lib/python2.7/SocketServer.py", line 284, in _handle_request_noblock
    self.process_request(request, client_address)
  File "/usr/local/python/lib/python2.7/SocketServer.py", line 310, in process_request
    self.finish_request(request, client_address)
  File "/usr/local/python/lib/python2.7/SocketServer.py", line 323, in finish_request
    self.RequestHandlerClass(request, client_address, self)
  File "/usr/local/python/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 570, in __init__
    BaseHTTPRequestHandler.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/local/python/lib/python2.7/SocketServer.py", line 641, in __init__
    self.finish()
  File "/usr/local/python/lib/python2.7/SocketServer.py", line 694, in finish
    self.wfile.flush()
  File "/usr/local/python/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 301, in flush
    self._sock.sendall(view[write_offset:write_offset+buffer_size])
error: [Errno 32] Broken pipe

I want to figure out why? Why does django just output unnamed Exception? Why does it depend on DEBUG variable.

This errors occurs mostly outside views when I have no access to request object. So I can't catch it in middleware or using logging handler.

UPDATE. I noticed if I request to django server directly I never get Broken pipe. So may the issue occur while Nginx proxy django?

Answer 1

This isn't really an issue with your site, more with the Django devserver: see this Django ticket. To put it bluntly, just ignore it as it is a known error, and won't be fixed.

In that ticket's comments a quite clear explanation is given:

According to many sources the 'Broken Pipe' is a normal browser quirk. For example, the browser reads from the socket and then decides that the image it's been reading apparently didn't change. The browser now this (forcefully) closes the connection because it does not need more data. The other end of this socket (the python runserver) now raises a socket exception telling the program that the client 'Broke the socket pipe'.