Falcon-Caching

This library provides cache support for the Falcon web framework.

It is a port of the popular Flask-Caching library.

The library aims to be compatible with CPython 3.7+ and PyPy 3.5+.

You can use this library both with a sync (WSGI) or an async (ASGI) app, by using the matching cache object (Cache or AsyncCache).

Documentation

You can find the documentation of this library on Read the Docs.

Quickstart

Quick example 1 - WSGI, e.g. sync:

import falcon
from falcon_caching import Cache

# setup the cache instance
cache = Cache(
    config=
    {
        'CACHE_EVICTION_STRATEGY': 'time-based',  # how records are evicted
        'CACHE_TYPE': 'simple'  # what backend to use to store the cache
    })

class ThingsResource:
    # mark the method as cached
    @cache.cached(timeout=600)
    def on_get(self, req, resp):
        pass

# add the cache middleware to the Falcon app
# you can use falcon.API() instead of falcon.App() below Falcon 3.0.0
app = falcon.App(middleware=cache.middleware)

things = ThingsResource()

app.add_route('/things', things)

Quick example 2 - ASGI, e.g. async:

import falcon.asgi
from falcon_caching import AsyncCache

# setup the cache instance
cache = AsyncCache(
    config=
    {
        'CACHE_EVICTION_STRATEGY': 'time-based',  # how records are evicted
        'CACHE_TYPE': 'simple'  # what backend to use to store the cache
    })

class ThingsResource:
    # mark the method as cached
    @cache.cached(timeout=600)
    async def on_get(self, req, resp):
        pass

app = falcon.asgi.App(middleware=cache.middleware)

things = ThingsResource()

app.add_route('/things', things)

Alternatively you could cache the whole resource (sync or async):

# mark the whole resource - all its 'on_' methods as cached
@cache.cached(timeout=600)
class ThingsResource:
    def on_get(self, req, resp):
        pass

    def on_post(self, req, resp):
        pass

NOTE:
Be careful with the order of middlewares. The cache.middleware will short-circuit any further processing if a cached version of that resource is found. It will skip any remaining process_request and process_resource methods, as well as the responder method that the request would have been routed to. However, any process_response middleware methods will still be called.

This is why it is suggested that you add the cache.middleware following any authentication / authorization middlewares to avoid unauthorized access of records served from the cache.

Development

For the development environment we use Pipenv and for packaging we use Flit.

Documentation

The documentation is built via Sphinx following the Google docstring style and hosted on Read the Docs.

To review the documentation locally before committing:

$ make docs
$ cd docs
$ python -m http.server 8088

Now you can access the documentation locally under http://127.0.0.1:8088/_build/html/

Development environment

To be able to test memcached the pylibmc library should be installed, which requires the memcached source to compile, so you will need to install libmemcached-dev first:

$ sudo apt-get install libmemcached-dev

You will also need Memcached, Redis and Redis Sentinel to be installed to be able to test against those locally:

$ sudo apt-get install memcached redis-server redis-sentinel

You will also need Python 3.7-3.10 and PyPy3 and its source package installed to run tox in all environments.

We do use type hinting and run MyPy on those, but unfortunately MyPy currently breaks the PyPy tests due to the typed-ast package's "bug" (see https://github.com/python/typed_ast/issues/97). Also with Pipenv you can't have a second Pipfile. This is why for now we don't have mypy listed as a dev package in the Pipfile.

Credits

As this is a port of the popular Flask-Caching library onto the Falcon web framework, parts of the code is copied from the Flask-Caching library.