Debugging Asterisk AGI in Python

Here is a one-liner that can literally save you days when developing a new asterisk AGI script in Python.

sys.stderr = open('/tmp/ast_agi_err.txt', 'w')

What it does is that it redirects STDERR to a file in /tmp so you can see the python console output after an un-handled  exception for example, that resulted in your agi script terminating early.
These kind of errors are not easy to find even with agi debug on, and can have you "scratching your head"  for hours if not days when debugging a new agi script

Get the md5 hash of a file from Python

Python has a module called haslib that provides secure hashes and message digests.
To get the md5 hash of a file all you have to do is this

import hashlib

in_file=open('path/to/file','rb').read()
hashlib.md5(in_file).hexdigest()