asymmetric 0.1.6

The async framework that calls you back! Enable ridiculously fast and easy module-to-API transformations. Learn in minutes, implement in seconds.

Asymmetric

The async framework that calls you back! ✨ Enable ridiculously fast and easy module-to-API transformations. Learn in minutes, implement in seconds.

Why Asymmetric?

Raw developing speed and ease of use, that's why. asymmetric is based on Starlette ✨! While Starlette is a powerful tool to have, getting it to work from scratch can be a bit of a pain, especially if you have never used it before. The idea behind asymmetric is to be able to take any module already written and transform it into a working API in a matter of minutes, instead of having to design the module ground-up to work with Starlette (it can also be used to build an API from scratch really fast). With asymmetric, you will also get some neat features, namely:

• Auto logging.
• Server-side error detection and exception handling.
• Asynchronous callback endpoints to make a request, terminate the request immediately and then have the server make a request to a callback endpoint with the results! ✨
• Auto-generated /docs endpoint for your API with interactive documentation. [UNDER CONSTRUCTION]
• Auto-generated OpenAPI Specification documentation files for your API. [UNDER CONSTRUCTION]

The complete documentation is available on the official website.

Installing

Install using pip!

pip install asymmetric

Usage

Running the development server

To start a server, choose your favorite ASGI server and target the asymmetric object!

uvicorn <module>:asymmetric

Where <module> is your module name (in the examples, we will be writing in a file named module.py, so the module name will be just module). A Starlette instance will be spawned immediately and can be reached at http://127.0.0.1:8000 by default. We don't have any endpoints yet, so we'll add some later.

Defining the API endpoints

The module consists of a main object called asymmetric, which includes an important element: the router decorator. Let's analyze it:

from asymmetric import asymmetric

@asymmetric.router("/some-route", methods=["post"], response_code=200, callback=False)

The decorator recieves 4 arguments: the route argument (the endpoint of the API to which the decorated function will map), the methods argument (a list of the methods accepted to connect to that endpoint, defaults in only POST requests), the response_code argument (the response code of the endpoint if everything goes according to the plan. Defaults to 200) and the callback argument (a boolean or an object specifying the request style for that endpoint, defaults to False, generating normal endpoint behaviour). The callback attribute will have its own section below, for now we will use the default callback=False.

Now let's imagine that we have the following method:

def some_function():
    """Greets the world."""
    return "Hello World!"

To transform that method into an API endpoint, all you need to do is add one line:

@asymmetric.router("/sample", methods=["get"])
def some_function():
    """Greets the world."""
    return "Hello World!"

Run uvicorn module:asymmetric and send a GET request to http://127.0.0.1:8000/sample. You should get a Hello World! in response! (To try it with a browser, make sure to run the above command and click this link).

But what about methods with arguments? Of course they can be API'd too! Let's now say that you have the following function:

def another_function(a, b=372):
    """
    Adds :a and :b and returns the result of
    that operation.
    """
    return a + b

To transform that method into an API endpoint, all you need to do, again, is add one line:

@asymmetric.router("/add")
def another_function(a, b=372):
    """
    Adds :a and :b and returns the result of
    that operation.
    """
    return a + b

Querying API endpoints

To give parameters to a function, all we need to do is send a json body with the names of the parameters as keys. Let's see how! Run uvicorn module:asymmetric and send a POST request (the default HTTP method) to http://127.0.0.1:8000/add, now using the httpx module.

import httpx

payload = {
    "a": 48,
    "b": 21
}
response = httpx.post("http://127.0.0.1:8000/add", json=payload)
print(response.json())

We got a 69 response! (48 + 21 = 69). Of course, you can return dictionaries from your methods and those will get returned as a json body in the response object automagically!

With this in mind, you can transform any existing project into a usable API very quickly!

What about async?

Given that the underlying framework is Starlette, you can use async to define your methods, no problem! Here's an example:

@asymmetric.router("/another-add")
async def another_async_function(a, b=372):
    """
    Adds :a and :b asynchronously and returns the
    result of that operation.
    """
    return a + b

Call me back!

Don't you hate it when people don't call you back after a date? We all have lived that annoying experience. But don't worry! asymmetric will call you back!

Some functions may be too heavy to be executed to respond to an HTTP request. Maybe your function is a predictor of some sort, and it requires an hour of processing time to spit out results. Here's when the callback parameter of the asymmetric decorator comes into play! You can ask asymmetric to terminate the HTTP request immediately, keep processing stuff and then, once it finishes, execute a request to a specified endpoint with the results. Let's imagine that we have a predict endpoint that we want to transform into an API:

def predict(data):
    values = Model.predict(data)

    # One hour later...
    return values

Just add the asymmetric decorator and you're good to go!

@asymmetric.router("/predict", callback=True)
def predict(data):
    values = Model.predict(data)

    # One hour later...
    return values

Of course, if you rely on some async sorcery for your operations, asymmetric can handle it!

@asymmetric.router("/predict", callback=True)
async def predict(data):
    values = await Model.predict(data)

    # One hour later...
    return values

Start the server with uvicorn module:asymmetric and now you are able to call the endpoint using the following snippet:

import httpx

response = httpx.post(
    "http://127.0.0.1:8000/predict",
    json={"data": mydata},
    headers={
        "asymmetric_callback_url": "http://callback.url/receive/predictions",
        "asymmetric_callback_method": "post",
    }
)

print(response)

Wow... What?! You just witnessed the magic of asymmetric. The response will be available immediately with a 202 status code. Meanwhile, the server will keep processing the request. When it finishes, it will make a POST request to the endpoint specified in the headers with the content of the method's return value. Cool, right? But what if I want to send the content of the method's return value inside a json, as the value of a predictions key? Well, that's easy! Just change the headers!

import httpx

response = httpx.post(
    "http://127.0.0.1:8000/predict",
    json={"data": mydata},
    headers={
        "asymmetric_callback_url": "http://callback.url/receive/predictions",
        "asymmetric_callback_method": "post",
        "asymmetric_custom_callback_key": "predictions",
    }
)

print(response)

That will send a json with one element, with predictions as a key and the result of the function as the value. The key here are the headers. They specify what to do with the result of your function. You can also change the required headers, if you want to!

callback_parameters = {
    "callback_url_header": "send_me_here",
    "callback_method_header": "use_me",
    "custom_callback_key_header": "put_me_in_here",
}

@asymmetric.router("/predict", callback=callback_parameters)
async def predict(data):
    values = await Model.predict(data)

    # One hour later...
    return values

Now, to achieve the same result as before, the requests must change their headers!

import httpx

response = httpx.post(
    "http://127.0.0.1:8000/predict",
    json={"data": mydata},
    headers={
        "send_me_here": "http://callback.url/receive/predictions",
        "use_me": "post",
        "put_me_in_here": "predictions",
    }
)

print(response)

As you probably imagine by now, the callback parameter can be a boolean or a dictionary with the following schema:

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "callback_url_header": {
            "type": "string"
        },
        "callback_method_header": {
            "type": "string"
        },
        "custom_callback_key_header": {
            "type": "string"
        }
    }
}

If no HTTP method is specified, the server will POST the information to the callback URL.

ReDoc Documentation

[UNDER CONSTRUCTION]

By default, you can GET the /docs endpoint (using a browser) to access to interactive auto-generated documentation about your API. It will include request bodies for each endpoint, response codes, authentication required, default values, and much more!

Tip: Given that the ReDoc Documentation is based on the OpenAPI standard, using type annotations in your code will result in a more detailed interactive documentation. Instead of the parameters being allowed to be any type, they will be forced into the type declared in your code. Cool, right?

To Do

• Automagic OpenAPI spec isn't being generated rigth now, so that's missing from the library. It will soon be added, though, as it is a very useful feature.
• Parse callback URLs to make sure that they are valid URLs, and fail if they aren't.
• On some initialization errors, the server should stop to avoid avoidable errors. Right now, the method to stop the server really does nothing, so that's something that should be addressed in the near future.

Developing

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/daleal/asymmetric.git

cd asymmetric

Recreate environment:

make get-poetry
make venv-with-dependencies

Resources

• Official Website
• Issue Tracker