An example server application and environment file using the ASGI FastAPI framework, running on Uvicorn.
First, let's understand the python web ecosystem a little more. This is a very non-exhaustive summary!
Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) is a "simple convention for web servers to forward requests to web applications or frameworks written in Python".
From wiki:
In 2003, Python web frameworks were typically written against only CGI, FastCGI, mod_python, or some other custom API of a specific web server
Quoting PEP 333:
By contrast, although Java has just as many web application frameworks available, Java's "servlet" API makes it possible for applications written with any Java web application framework to run in any web server that supports the servlet API.
Wiki again:
WSGI was thus created as an implementation-agnostic interface between web servers and web applications or frameworks to promote common ground for portable web application development.
Commonly, a server application is comprised of some kind of framework and a particular server. Some you may have heard of:
- Flask is a web microframework, commonly run on a WSGI server like Gunicorn.
- Django is an extensive web framework, which can run on WSGI servers (but also ASGI servers).
- Tornado is both a non-blocking WSGI server and web application framework. You may have seen it used in Jupyter, where it is the server of choice for HTTP requests.
WSGI was developed in the days before async-capability came to Python.
The Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface ASGI was created as a spiritual successor to WSGI for asynchronous python applications.
Some you may have heard of:
- Daphne is the current ASGI reference server, written in Twisted and maintained as part of the Django Channels project.
- Uvicorn is an ASGI server that scores very high on performance.
- as we mentioned above, Django can run on WSGI servers.
- Sanic is a combined async web framework and server.
- FastAPI is a high-performance async web framework, typically run on Uvicorn.
Now you know some of the history, let me sell you on FastAPI.
FastAPI is a modern, fast, robust, and very flexible framework for building APIs that document themselves.
If you've used Flask and Gunicorn, you should feel very at home.
FastAPI is built on the OenAPI standard for documentation, and uses Python 3.8+'s own built-in type checking to validate data and populate documentation on your APIs.
It also has some of the best docs in the business:
We include an example server, in web_app/main.py, and a conda env file
conda_env.yml.
There are two endpoints:
- GET /public/test: a simple test to return a message
- POST /merge: an endpoint to simulate the manipulation of some shared resource. Takes a branch_name in the request body.
If you POST to merge with the expected format (for that see Read the Docs!) then we simulate a set of shared resources being used for 10 seconds.
If the shared resource for branch_name is free, we return a simple message confirming the merge is in process.
If the shared resource for branch_name is not free, we return a 401 code with the detail that the shared resource is in use.
With conda installed, a simple
conda env create -f conda_env.ymlwill create an env called example_fastapi_server:
conda activate example_fastapi_serverIf you would prefer not to use conda, create a virtualenv and run:
pip install fastapi[all] To run the server:
uvicorn web_app.main:appTo read your self-generating documentation, go to
http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs in your web browser of choice.
You can also directly interact with the API from this page, with all the expected POST data, param queries etc. accounted for!
To download the OpenAPI json specification for your API, to
automatically interface client applications or the like, just request
from http://127.0.0.1:8000/openapi.json
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