responder/docs/source/index.rst

.. responder documentation master file, created by
   sphinx-quickstart on Thu Oct 11 12:58:34 2018.
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A familiar HTTP Service Framework
=================================

|Build Status| |image1| |image2| |image3| |image4| |image5|

.. |Build Status| image:: https://travis-ci.org/kennethreitz/responder.svg?branch=master
   :target: https://travis-ci.org/kennethreitz/responder
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   :target: https://pypi.org/project/responder/
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   :target: https://pypi.org/project/responder/
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   :target: https://pypi.org/project/responder/
.. |image4| image:: https://img.shields.io/github/contributors/kennethreitz/responder.svg
   :target: https://github.com/kennethreitz/responder/graphs/contributors
.. |image5| image:: https://img.shields.io/badge/Say%20Thanks-!-1EAEDB.svg
   :target: https://saythanks.io/to/kennethreitz

The Python world certainly doesn't need more web frameworks. But, it does need more creativity, so I thought I'd
spread some `Hacktoberfest <https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/>`_ spirit around, bring some of my ideas to the table, and see what I could come up with.

.. code:: python

   import responder

   api = responder.API()

   @api.route("/{greeting}")
   async def greet_world(req, resp, *, greeting):
       resp.text = f"{greeting}, world!"

   if __name__ == '__main__':
       api.run()

That ``async`` declaration is optional.

This gets you a ASGI app, with a production static files server
pre-installed, jinja2 templating (without additional imports), and a
production webserver based on uvloop, serving up requests with gzip
compression automatically.

Features
--------

- A pleasant API, with a single import statement.
- Class-based views without inheritence.
- ASGI framework, the future of Python web services.
- The ability to mount any ASGI / WSGI app at a subroute.
- *f-string syntax* route declaration.
- Mutable response object, passed into each view. No need to return anything.
- Background tasks, spawned off in a ``ThreadPoolExecutor``.
- GraphQL (with *GraphiQL*) support!
- OpenAPI schema generation.
- Single-page webapp support!

Testimonials
------------

   “Pleasantly very taken with python-responder.
   `@kennethreitz <https://twitter.com/kennethreitz>`_ at his absolute
   best.”

    —Rudraksh M.K.



..

   "ASGI is going to enable all sorts of new high-performance web services. It's awesome to see Responder starting to take advantage of that."

    —Tom Christie, author of `Django REST Framework`_

..


   “I love that you are exploring new patterns. Go go go!”

    — Danny Greenfield, author of `Two Scoops of Django`_


..


   “The most ambitious crossover event in history.”

    —Pablo Cabezas, `on Tom Christie joining the project`_


.. _APIStar: https://github.com/encode/apistar
.. _Django REST Framework: https://www.django-rest-framework.org/
.. _Two Scoops of Django:
.. _on Tom Christie joining the project: https://twitter.com/pabloteleco/status/1050841098321620992?s=20

User Guides
-----------

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 2

   quickstart
   tour
   deployment
   api


Installing Responder
--------------------

.. code-block:: shell

    $ pipenv install responder
    ✨🍰✨

Only **Python 3.6+** is supported.


The Basic Idea
--------------

The primary concept here is to bring the niceties that are brought forth from both Flask and Falcon and unify them into a single framework, along with some new ideas I have. I also wanted to take some of the API primitives that are instilled in the Requests library and put them into a web framework. So, you'll find a lot of parallels here with Requests.

- Setting ``resp.text`` sends back unicode, while setting ``resp.content`` sends back bytes.
- Setting ``resp.media`` sends back JSON/YAML (``.text``/``.content`` override this).
- Case-insensitive ``req.headers`` dict (from Requests directly).
- ``resp.status_code``, ``req.method``, ``req.url``, and other familiar friends.

Ideas
-----

- Flask-style route expression, with new capabilities -- all while using Python 3.6+'s new f-string syntax.
- I love Falcon's "every request and response is passed into to each view and mutated" methodology, especially ``response.media``, and have used it here. In addition to supporting JSON, I have decided to support YAML as well, as Kubernetes is slowly taking over the world, and it uses YAML for all the things. Content-negotiation and all that.
- **A built in testing client that uses the actual Requests you know and love**.
- The ability to mount other WSGI apps easily.
- Automatic gzipped-responses.
- In addition to Falcon's ``on_get``, ``on_post``, etc methods, Responder features an ``on_request`` method, which gets called on every type of request, much like Requests.
- A production static files server is built-in.
- Uvicorn built-in as a production web server. I would have chosen Gunicorn, but it doesn't run on Windows. Plus, Uvicorn serves well to protect against slowloris attacks, making nginx unneccessary in production.
- GraphQL support, via Graphene. The goal here is to have any GraphQL query exposable at any route, magically.


Future Ideas
------------

- Cookie-based sessions are currently an afterthought, as this is an API framework, but websites are APIs too.
- If frontend websites are supported, provide an official way to run webpack.



Indices and tables
==================

* :ref:`genindex`
* :ref:`modindex`
* :ref:`search`