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New Python REST API and CLI micro-framework
- leehro 11y agoLooks nice. I loved the README - good concise examples that illustrate why each piece is there.
- jdnier 11y agoSo how would I use Hug as a secure public API -- https, authentication, authorization? Would I read up on Falcon? Are there any examples you could point to of how that might be done?
- timothycrosley 11y agohttps://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/examples/authentication.py https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/examples/...
- raarts 11y agoIs there a https example? Personally I think all examples online should use ssl by default these days. http should be banned altogether.
- timothycrosley 11y agoThat's not how things work when using any WSGI based framework, the SSL part should be handled by either uwsgi / gunicorn or nginx. Development servers (hug or Flask or any other) should basically never be used directly. Examples can, and should be done using HTTP to allow local testing.
- chowes 11y agoHow does this help development of a REST API? Seems more like a webserver
- cjauvin 11y agoWhile browsing his other repos, I found this tool by the same author, which is also really great: https://github.com/timothycrosley/isort https://github.com/timothycrosley/isort (Emacs integration works very well!)
- austinjp 11y agoThis looks very interesting, thanks for posting. I love the simplicity of adding the CLI, versioning, and web API. @timothycrosley, if you're still monitoring this thread... :) ... a handful of questions: Is HUG "production ready"? Could or should I use this to power a service with thousands of paying users? Is anyone currently doing this? Is HUG likely to be around in a couple of years? I'm sure we all hope that it will be :) I guess I'm curious about how much time and resources you can dedicate to this. Perhaps in summary I should just ask: why wouldn't developers just use Django, for example? While Django may be comparatively complex it also brings a degree of confidence, being "battle hardened" and having a recent cash injection from Mozilla. (I'm sure other frameworks may have similar boasts.) I appreciate that these questions might be seen as cynical or snarky -- they're not intended to be, I'm genuinely curious. There's a huge amount of frameworks churn at the moment. It seems like a precarious area to be launching a product, and some confidence-boosting info regarding longevity and production-suitability would be greatly appreciated.
- timothycrosley 11y agoHi @austinjp, I would be more then happy to answer your questions! 1) Is HUG "production ready?": YES! Several large companies have emailed me or chatted with the community for support for their already in production APIs. Based on my communications for instance, I know for a fact that one API hosted with hug is leveraged by at least 10 fortune 100 companies. 2) I have several projects, that I continue to support like isort which are several years old. I don't abondon projects, and hug is already at the point where it isn't my project but a community project which has upwards of 16 contributors already. The real reason to use hug instead of Django is because your code and therefore your liability and maintance cost will be drastically lower. In every example where I've ported or seen an API ported it's been upwards of 90% code reduction. In several cases even if hug just all the sudden went away, your cost for maintaining hug itself would still be smaller then using code developed on-top of Django. It's a major enough improvement not to be able to be ignored. Thanks! ~Timothy
- austinjp 11y agoHi Timothy, reply much appreciated -- sounds good.
- squiguy7 11y agoAt a quick glance, this reminds me of bottle. The fact that it uses falcon as a basis for the engine is great too. I get the feeling that you could write up an API with this in a day and it would perform well.
- gifenvy 11y agoHonestly I'm mosts impressed that the example gif is only ~480kb despite being high quality and pretty long! How did you do that, author?
- jorge_leria 11y agohttp://i.imgur.com/5sReybQ.gif http://i.imgur.com/5sReybQ.gif Same image -> 333kb. There are a few tricks that you can apply to reduce the size while keeping the same visible quality: http://ezgif.com/optimize http://ezgif.com/optimize
- wanda 11y agoI'm not the author, but I'm pretty sure GIFs start to inflate when you increase colour depth. GIFs we see on social networks are typically captured from videos of real-life objects, places and people, so the source colour-depth is pretty high (to account for the necessary shades created by varying exposure to light in three dimensions) and thus even a poor-quality GIF is going to be quite big to represent the source media with any discernible accuracy. Since that terminal sports very few colours, it can be saved with low colour-depth and thence remain very small, despite size and length.
- timothycrosley 11y agoGimp ;) (I know this doesn't answer your question, but it's the only answer I have O:-))
- kseistrup 11y agoAsciinema could also be a useful way to present the example. https://asciinema.org/ https://asciinema.org/
- RussianCow 11y agoIt wouldn't be useful in this particular case because you wouldn't actually get to see the browser window (I guess you could curl it or something). But this is a really neat tool, I'll definitely be using it. Thanks for sharing!
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- nathancahill 11y agoNeat, but it's almost like Flask/bottle. Wouldn't some of the unique features be better implemented on top of a well established microframework? The API versioning bit is interesting, it would work well as a Flask decorator.
- timothycrosley 11y agoauthor here: This is way more then Flask/Bottle, I understand what would make you reach that conclusion, but if you look here https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/ARCHITECTURE.md#the-guiding-thought-behind-the-architecture https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/ARCHITECT... You can see just how much it adds that really are core concepts that can't be done with simple decorators on-top of Flask. Highlights: - Automatic documentation - Type annotation based validation and transformation of input fields - Directives to inject more data (like request data) into existing functions in a safe and reusable way - It's easily twice as fast at handling requests as Flask, making Flask a rather horrible base for any competitor
- gsibble 11y agoI would argue that it handles requests twice as fast because it contains about half as many features. And I've added automatic documentation to many of my flask projects. Not knocking on your excellent project, just suggesting you stop knocking on Flask, which is an excellent wsgi server.
- kstrauser 11y agoLikewise. Flask surely isn't the end-all, be-all of web frameworks, but I've added autodocs to it for a past employer that included full autodiscovery. It's not exactly trivial but it's far from difficult.
- timothycrosley 11y agoHug contains the features flask contains. I haven't and I don't think you will in this entire thread see a single example of someone actually pointing a feature missing in hug that is relevant for APIs (not HTML websites like Jinja)
- akoumjian 11y agoLooks mildly inspired by itty!
- ipsum2 11y agoIf it uses Falcon under the hood, why not just use Falcon?
- ralmidani 11y agoComputers use binary under the hood, but we layer abstractions on top of that to make programming easier and more productive.
- timothycrosley 11y agoIt has a way simpler programming interface then Falcon while retaining the speed benefits: and is really a way more powerful concept as explained here: https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/ARCHITECTURE.md#the-guiding-thought-behind-the-architecture https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/ARCHITECT... The real question should be, why take the time to write Falcon when you can get the same performance and more code-reuse using hug?
- mixmastamyk 11y agoPerhaps they will like your simplifications, and could merge them.
- timothycrosley 11y agoThey really aren't compatible concepts. It's sort of like the difference between werkzeug and Flask, those projects wouldn't and shouldn't ever be merged. Falcon is like a much faster werkzeug with a great maintainer, we've discussed the projects together and both agree that they both should remain separate and both are mutually beneficial.
- leetrout 11y agoThis looks neat. I like the 404 handler showing a spec! The title confused me as I expected something to help me write a CLI app... If anyone else was thinking that way I highly recommend looking at pyinvoke.org or Argh.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- timothycrosley 11y agoauthor: Hug actually does make it super easy to write a CLI app, you can see an example here: https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/examples/cli.py https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/examples/... and a full explanation of the concept here: https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/ARCHITECTURE.md#the-guiding-thought-behind-the-architecture https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/ARCHITECT...
- timothycrosley 11y agoAuthor here: I encourage anyone that is curious about the reason for this framework as opposed to X to read the project's architecture document https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/ARCHITECTURE.md#the-guiding-thought-behind-the-architecture https://github.com/timothycrosley/hug/blob/develop/ARCHITECT.... Some highlights: it allows some of the most concise Python code, produces automatic documentation, supports annotation based validation and argument transformation, automatically enables version management, and is way faster then Flask / Django at handling requests. Also, I'm free to answer any questions you may have :)
- voltagex_ 11y agoWhy is it way faster than Flask? Are there any changes that can be made to Flask to improve the speed? Would it be silly to use both Flask and Hug?
- timothycrosley 11y agoThere's a bunch of reasons, but they really come down to a focus on memory efficiency and knowledge of how certain things perform on Python (using hasattr instead of isinstance where applicable, using __slots__, only processing things when it's clear they need to be processed). And then for extra measure: Cython compilation. You can see a competing frameworks benchmarks showing the result of all this work here: http://pycnic.nullism.com/ http://pycnic.nullism.com/
- voltagex_ 11y agoThat's really cool, thanks.
- seabrookmx 11y ago> produces automatic documentation, supports annotation based validation and argument transformation These aren't new, though the approach to them seems quite clean. > automatically enables version management There's syntax sugar in the decorators for supporting versioned api's, sure.. but you still need separate functions for each version. I think the wording oversells the feature a bit. > and is way faster then Flask / Django at handling requests In what configuration? Pretty much anything is faster than Flask's included development server. Is it faster than Flask configured with nginx over wsgi? If so, how much faster? The best way to convince people of this is to not only post benchmark results, but also commit the benchmarks themselves so people can run them. Project looks neat but Flask is well though out, well supported, has amazing documentation, and supports both Python 2.x and 3.x.. which leaves little reason to switch (with the exception of the CLI interface.. which I can't deny is pretty darn cool).
- NamTaf 11y agoI used web.py to do a similar process about 1.5 years ago. In that, I mapped the GET and POST elements to functions which then did whatever I needed them to do. This makes it even easier and I see it having a good fit in hacking up PoC APIs. In my case, I was querying some databases and aggregating data for display in a web page as well as via XML/JSON in a RESTful interface. This would make the XML/JSON stuff very easy indeed.
- jack_jennings 11y agoHow could you not like this with that mascot?
- DannoHung 11y agoI didn't know Python 3 supported some of the syntax in use here.
- benatkin 11y agoI was hoping it would be Pythonic, but it has a "directive" feature which appears to be an ad hoc extension of the python language.
- rspeer 11y agoAre you referring to decorators? Those have been around since Python 2.4, and have been used for this kind of purpose for over a decade.
- wantreprenr007 11y agoNeat. Swagger and HAL support make APIs easier to digest
- vaulstein 11y agoCan we have a benchmarking post done? Flask, Bottle, Django and maybe even Falcon(http://falconframework.org/ http://falconframework.org/) ?
- peletiah 11y agoHmm, does it offer anything over Pyramid/Cornice? Pyramid is also quick and easy to start (i.e. "Micro") and allows to extend a project to a full featureset when necessary (Auth, Routing, Model,...). edit: Sorry I don't add anything more constructive to the discussion. Hope author does not feel discouraged, writing OSS and then getting asked "What's the point?" sure is disheartening.
- mixmastamyk 11y agoNice work, I'll have to investigate this as opposed to standard Falcon. This is generally discouraged, I would change these in the readme: .format(**locals())
- matheist 11y agoInteresting; I hadn't seen that before, and as soon as I saw it I thought "ooh shiny!". Is there a quick reason why I shouldn't use it?
- mixmastamyk 11y agoIt isn't forbidden, just that it might leak information, doesn't perform well, and is unsightly. Py 3.6 should have the syntax to simplify, without locals/globals: f'Hello, {name} {age}'
- dagss 11y agoAs for leaking info, your Py3.6 example leaks exactly as much (i.e., what is referenced in the literal). In fact you could consider it syntactic sugar for the locals() (although faster I guess).
- jonathan_s 11y agoYes, but it's unsafe for another reason. The new syntax can be verified statically by tools like Pylint. A call to locals() is hard to verify. The locals() function itself could for instance have been replaced by something else. When using locals(), you won't know until execution time if a local variable, required for the interpolation is missing. Even worse, linter tools (pylint, pyflakes, jedi, ...) are now going to tell you that certain variables are not used, and people are going to remove it without thinking that somewhere a locals() call is going to use it. This is very bad. Actually, the effects of using locals() cannot be verified statically, even more because locals() is also a writable dict. For f-strings, the name bindings are static, and editors are going to understand it while editing.
- dwightgunning 11y agoCongrats on shipping and taking the time to post and answer questions here. Looks like a nice step forward. I am looking forward to trying this out!
- zbyte64 11y agoReminds me of all the good stuff I liked from node's restify. I've used allot of python api frameworks and I definitely like the direction.
- timeu 11y agoThat looks really cool ! I actually started to use Falcon for a relatively simple REST only backend (for a py3 project). This might make my life a bit easier.
- Phemist 11y agoThanks! This looks great, will definitely try it out. One question, what would be the recommended way to define complex data types? E.g. def stuff(arg1: int, arg2: dict): return 'Ok' where arg2 would be a dictionary that should contain specific, predefined fields? This might also instead be a general question about Python type hinting
- BrandonHoffman 11y agoI'm a contributor to the hug project. we are currently working on a way of doing this which should be released to the development version this week and will be released with version 2.0 basically the modification would allow you to create a new type which has multiple predefined fields. like so: class User(Type): username = Chain(text, LongerThan(10)) password = Chain(text, LongerThan(10)) After creating this type you could then use it as a type as normal def stuff(arg1: int, arg2: User): return 'Ok'
- kstrauser 11y agoMay I make a suggestion? Please, PLEASE use a standardized Python modeling tool like Schematics, Marshmallow, etc. as your description language. Then your users can use the same models for their REST framework as for their ORM and everything else. I'm begging: please do not reinvent this. Just don't.
- timothycrosley 11y agokstrauser: Hug supports marshmallow! Right now, you can use Marshmallow types out of the box for any API call just set the Marshmallow type as the type after the annotation and it will work and validate as expected :)
- kstrauser 11y agoExcellent, thanks!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- w_t_payne 11y agoI really like the fact that it allows the program logic to be exposed as Python, CLI & Web API in one fell swoop. It makes me think about what other interfaces could be automagically created at the same time -- C? Simulink?