"getaddrinfo failed", what does that mean?

It most likely means the hostname can't be resolved.

import socket
socket.getaddrinfo('localhost', 8080)

If it doesn't work there, it's not going to work in the Bottle example. You can try '127.0.0.1' instead of 'localhost' in case that's the problem.

The problem, in my case, was that some install at some point defined an environment variable http_proxy on my machine when I had no proxy.

Removing the http_proxy environment variable fixed the problem.