attrs 16.1.0

Attributes Without Boilerplate

attrs is the Python package that will bring back the joy of writing classes by relieving you from the drudgery of implementing object protocols (aka dunder methods).

Its main goal is to help you to write concise and correct software without slowing down your code.

For that, it gives you a class decorator and a way to declaratively define the attributes on that class:

>>> import attr
>>> @attr.s
... class C(object):
...     x = attr.ib(default=42)
...     y = attr.ib(default=attr.Factory(list))
...
...     def hard_math(self, z):
...         return self.x * self.y * z
>>> i = C(x=1, y=2)
>>> i
C(x=1, y=2)
>>> i.hard_math(3)
6
>>> i == C(1, 2)
True
>>> i != C(2, 1)
True
>>> attr.asdict(i)
{'y': 2, 'x': 1}
>>> C()
C(x=42, y=[])
>>> C2 = attr.make_class("C2", ["a", "b"])
>>> C2("foo", "bar")
C2(a='foo', b='bar')

After declaring your attributes attrs gives you:

• a concise and explicit overview of the class’s attributes,

• a nice human-readable __repr__,

• a complete set of comparison methods,

• an initializer,

• and much more,

without writing dull boilerplate code again and again and without runtime performance penalties.

This gives you the power to use actual classes with actual types in your code instead of confusing tuples or confusingly behaving namedtuples. Which in turn encourages you to write small classes that do one thing well. Never again violate the single responsibility principle just because implementing __init__ et al is a painful drag.

Testimonials

I’m looking forward to is being able to program in Python-with-attrs everywhere. It exerts a subtle, but positive, design influence in all the codebases I’ve see it used in.

—Glyph Lefkowitz, inventor of Twisted and Software Developer at Rackspace in The One Python Library Everyone Needs

I’m increasingly digging your attr.ocity. Good job!

—Łukasz Langa, prolific CPython core developer and Production Engineer at Facebook

Project Information

attrs is released under the MIT license, its documentation lives at Read the Docs, the code on GitHub, and the latest release on PyPI. It’s rigorously tested on Python 2.7, 3.4+, and PyPy.

Release Information

16.1.0 (2016-08-30)

Backward-incompatible changes:

• All instances where function arguments were called cl have been changed to the more Pythonic cls. Since it was always the first argument, it’s doubtful anyone ever called those function with in the keyword form. If so, sorry for any breakage but there’s no practical deprecation path to solve this ugly wart.

Deprecations:

• Accessing Attribute instances on class objects is now deprecated and will stop working in 2017. If you need introspection please use the __attrs_attrs__ attribute or the attr.fields function that carry them too. In the future, the attributes that are defined on the class body and are usually overwritten in your __init__ method are simply removed after @attr.s has been applied.

  This will remove the confusing error message if you write your own __init__ and forget to initialize some attribute. Instead you will get a straightforward AttributeError. In other words: decorated classes will work more like plain Python classes which was always attrs’s goal.

• The serious business aliases attr.attributes and attr.attr have been deprecated in favor of attr.attrs and attr.attrib which are much more consistent and frankly obvious in hindsight. They will be purged from documentation immediately but there are no plans to actually remove them.

Changes:

• attr.asdict‘s dict_factory arguments is now propagated on recursion. #45

• attr.asdict, attr.has and attr.fields are significantly faster. #48 #51

• Add attr.attrs and attr.attrib as a more consistent aliases for attr.s and attr.ib.

• Add frozen option to attr.s that will make instances best-effort immutable. #60

• attr.asdict now takes retain_collection_types as an argument. If True, it does not convert attributes of type tuple or set to list. #69

Full changelog.

Credits

attrs is written and maintained by Hynek Schlawack.

The development is kindly supported by Variomedia AG.

A full list of contributors can be found in GitHub’s overview.

It’s the spiritual successor of characteristic and aspires to fix some of it clunkiness and unfortunate decisions. Both were inspired by Twisted’s FancyEqMixin but both are implemented using class decorators because sub-classing is bad for you, m’kay?