decorator

The goal of the decorator module is to make it easy to define signature-preserving function decorators and decorator factories. It also includes an implementation of multiple dispatch and other niceties (please check the docs). It is released under a two-clauses BSD license, i.e. basically you can do whatever you want with it but I am not responsible.

Installation

If you are lazy, just perform

$ pip install decorator

which will install just the module on your system.

If you prefer to install the full distribution from source, including the documentation, clone the GitHub repo or download the tarball, unpack it and run

$ pip install .

in the main directory, possibly as superuser.

Testing

If you have the source code installation you can run the tests with

$ python tests/test.py -v

or (if you have setuptools installed)

$ python setup.py test

Notice that you may run into trouble if in your system there is an older version of the decorator module; in such a case remove the old version. It is safe even to copy the module decorator.py over an existing one, since we kept backward-compatibility for a long time.

Repository

The project is hosted on GitHub. You can look at the source here:

https://github.com/micheles/decorator

Documentation

The documentation has been moved to https://github.com/micheles/decorator/blob/master/docs/documentation.md

From there you can get a PDF version by simply using the print functionality of your browser.

Here is the documentation for previous versions of the module:

https://github.com/micheles/decorator/blob/4.3.2/docs/tests.documentation.rst https://github.com/micheles/decorator/blob/4.2.1/docs/tests.documentation.rst https://github.com/micheles/decorator/blob/4.1.2/docs/tests.documentation.rst https://github.com/micheles/decorator/blob/4.0.0/documentation.rst https://github.com/micheles/decorator/blob/3.4.2/documentation.rst

For the impatient

Here is an example of how to define a family of decorators tracing slow operations:

from decorator import decorator

@decorator
def warn_slow(func, timelimit=60, *args, **kw):
    t0 = time.time()
    result = func(*args, **kw)
    dt = time.time() - t0
    if dt > timelimit:
        logging.warning('%s took %d seconds', func.__name__, dt)
    else:
        logging.info('%s took %d seconds', func.__name__, dt)
    return result

@warn_slow  # warn if it takes more than 1 minute
def preprocess_input_files(inputdir, tempdir):
    ...

@warn_slow(timelimit=600)  # warn if it takes more than 10 minutes
def run_calculation(tempdir, outdir):
    ...

Enjoy!

Metadata

Release files for decorator 5.3.0

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for decorator 5.3.0
File	Size	Uploaded
decorator-5.3.0.tar.gz	58.4 kB	May 17, 2026	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for decorator 5.3.0
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
decorator-5.3.0-py3-none-any.whl 11.1 kB May 17, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 69.5 kB

Release files / decorator-5.3.0.tar.gz

Download URL	decorator-5.3.0.tar.gz
Size	58.4 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`95fda3122972c847cf0ff7e0ce2829bf25136f2526b627b3da85b60ca5f485c0`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`5c50a39dd7ab407e93978dfa07d109b7d633e37958c89f30cbcec061b77b3ebc`
Upload date	May 17, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/6.2.0 CPython/3.13.13`

Release files / decorator-5.3.0-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	decorator-5.3.0-py3-none-any.whl
Size	11.1 kB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`f8c2d71ede92f073144ddd7f3e9fbbc3bd0f2f29522c9d75ee648d66553834f4`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`d56ff8d0bba4dc2a69817d74f640d504650241ebf2f9f7263426f1b953b344d4`
Upload date	May 17, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/6.2.0 CPython/3.13.13`