2.0 KiB
Responder: A Familiar HTTP Service Framework
Responder is a web framework for Python that flips Requests inside out. If Requests is how you consume HTTP, Responder is how you serve it, using the same mental model.
$ uv pip install responder
What It Looks Like
import responder
api = responder.API()
@api.route("/")
def home(req, resp):
resp.html = "<h1>Hello, world.</h1>"
@api.route("/api/data")
def data(req, resp):
resp.media = {"message": "Hello from Responder", "status": "ok"}
@api.route("/greet/{name}")
async def greet(req, resp, *, name):
resp.text = f"Hello, {name}!"
if __name__ == "__main__":
api.run()
resp.text sends text. resp.html sends HTML. resp.media sends JSON. req.headers is a case-insensitive dict, just like in Requests. The async keyword is optional. If you know Requests, you already know half of Responder.
The Idea
I wanted to take the API primitives from Requests and put them into a web framework. The niceties of Flask and the performance philosophy of Falcon, unified with a Requests-like interface for responses. Setting resp.content sends bytes. Setting resp.media sends JSON. Case-insensitive headers. Familiar status codes.
It was a bit ahead of its time. Some of these ideas, like automatic async handling and type-aware serialization, showed up later in FastAPI, which I'd recommend for production use today. Responder was always more of an experiment in API design than a production framework. But as an exercise in "what if the server-side felt like the client-side?" I think it holds up.
Install
$ uv pip install responder
Resources
Related
- Requests — The client-side library whose philosophy Responder mirrors.
- From HTTP to Consciousness — The design thinking behind both libraries.