ffroute 0.1.3

Starlette-compatible URL route matcher as a native Python extension (~29× faster than Starlette's linear regex scan).

ffroute

Experimental — APIs may change.

A Starlette/FastAPI-compatible URL route matcher implemented as a native Python extension (Rust + PyO3). Replaces Starlette's linear-regex-scan with a min-index segment trie — 100–200× faster on real-world OpenAPI specs (Stripe, GitHub, Kubernetes), while preserving Starlette's exact first-registered-wins semantics, including its static-vs-param shadowing behaviour.

When to use this

ffroute helps when route matching is actually slow enough to notice:

• Hundreds of routes — Starlette's linear regex scan shows up in flame graphs (the original 740-route measurement that motivated this package found routing was ~13 % of request time).
• Lots of 404 traffic — bots, scanners, deprecated endpoints. The trie fails fast at the first non-matching segment; the "miss" speedup is even larger than the hit speedup (see Performance).
• App startup matters — ffroute builds the routing table 50–200× faster than Starlette's regex compile (sub-millisecond vs 10–45 ms on the OpenAPI specs below). Useful for cold-start serverless and frequent restarts in CI.

Skip if you have fewer than ~50 routes (savings are real but small in absolute terms), or if you use custom starlette.convertors.Convertor subclasses — FFRouter still works correctly (Starlette's per-route check filters), but loses the trie fast-path for those segments.

Install

pip install ffroute               # core (zero Python deps)
pip install 'ffroute[starlette]'  # with FFRouter — the Starlette/FastAPI drop-in
# or
uv add ffroute

Pre-built wheels are published for CPython 3.10–3.14 on Linux (manylinux + musllinux, x86_64 + aarch64), macOS (x86_64 + arm64) and Windows (x86_64). For other platforms, pip install builds from sdist — needs a Rust toolchain (rustup default stable).

Usage

Drop-in for Starlette / FastAPI

from fastapi import FastAPI
from ffroute import speedup

app = FastAPI()

@app.get('/users/{user_id}')
def show_user(user_id: int) -> dict:
    return {'user_id': user_id}

# Swap the path-matching layer for ffroute. That's it — method dispatch,
# Mount, Host, redirect_slashes, /openapi.json, /docs all unchanged.
speedup(app)

speedup(app) rebinds app.router to a dynamically-built subclass that mixes FFRouter into whatever router class the app already uses (starlette.routing.Router or fastapi.routing.APIRouter). FFRouter's path-scan overrides win; everything else — including FastAPI's OpenAPI-schema cache hooks — stays intact. It's idempotent: a second call just re-indexes.

By default speedup recurses into Mount sub-apps and applies the same treatment to any Starlette/FastAPI app (or bare Router) it finds — so a heavily-routed sub-app behind Mount('/api', app=sub) gets the trie too, not just the top-level router. Mounts wrapping non-router ASGI apps (StaticFiles, raw callables) are left alone. Pass recursive=False to opt out:

speedup(app, recursive=False)  # only the top-level router

Equivalent manual form, if you're on plain Starlette (and don't need to preserve a custom router subclass):

from ffroute import FFRouter
app.router.__class__ = FFRouter
app.router._rebuild_index()

Advanced: low-level matcher

For a custom dispatch layer outside Starlette, use the raw trie matcher directly — no framework dependency, integers in / integers out:

import ffroute

router = ffroute.Router([
    '/users/me',                           # 0
    '/users/{user_id:int}',                # 1
    '/items/{item_id}',                    # 2
    '/static/{file:path}',                 # 3
])

router.match('/users/me')        # -> 0   (first-registered wins)
router.match('/users/42')        # -> 1
router.match('/items/abc')       # -> 2
router.match('/static/a/b.png')  # -> 3
router.match('/missing')         # -> None

API reference

symbol	needs	use case
ffroute.Router	—	low-level Rust trie; returns the integer index of the matching pattern
ffroute.FFRouter	starlette	starlette.routing.Router subclass; drop-in replacement
ffroute.speedup(app)	starlette	one-liner: rebind an existing app's router class

Router methods:

method	returns	use case
match(path)	int | None — best (lowest-index) match	single-request dispatch
match_many(paths)	list[int] — -1 for no match	batch matching
match_all(path)	list[int] — every candidate, in trie-walk order	candidate narrowing (then run the framework's own per-route check)

Compatibility

speedup(app) swaps only the path-matching scan. Everything else stays the framework's job — FFRouter is a starlette.routing.Router subclass that runs Starlette's per-route check on each candidate the trie surfaces.

Feature	Status
FastAPI @app.get / @app.post / decorators	✅
FastAPI APIRouter + include_router (prefix, tags, dependencies)	✅
Starlette Route with methods=[...] (→ 405 on method mismatch)	✅
Starlette Mount / sub-apps (always considered as candidates)	✅
Nested Mount (Mount inside Mount inside Mount…)	✅
Speedup propagates into Mount sub-apps and Mount(routes=[...])	✅ via recursive=True (default); opt out with speedup(app, recursive=False)
Starlette Host routing	✅
WebSocket routes	✅
redirect_slashes (trailing-slash redirect)	✅
FastAPI auto-generated /openapi.json, /docs, /redoc	✅
Built-in path convertors (str, int, float, uuid, path)	✅ fast-path
Custom starlette.convertors.Convertor subclasses	⚠️ works through FFRouter (Starlette filters); loses the trie fast-path
app.router.add_route(...) after speedup()	✅ trie rebuilds; O(N), so register routes before speedup() when possible
Calling speedup(app) twice	✅ idempotent — just re-indexes

All cases above are covered by tests/test_ffrouter.py.

Supported segment kinds

ffroute mirrors Starlette's convertors.py:

segment	regex	note
static	exact match	HashMap fast path
{name} / {name:str}	[^/]+	regex-free fast path
{name:int}	[0-9]+	typed convertor
{name:float}	[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?	typed convertor
{name:uuid}	[0-9a-f]{8}-[0-9a-f]{4}-…	typed convertor
{name:path}	.*	consumes the remainder of the path
compound (e.g. {user}:disable, ({n:int}))	anchored whole-segment regex	mixed literal + param

Semantics: match returns the minimum registration index among all patterns that match. This is exactly Starlette's "first-registered wins" rule, including the FastAPI footgun where /x/{id}/ registered before /x/bulk/ makes GET /x/bulk/ match the param route with id="bulk". Drop-in routers from other ecosystems (httprouter, matchit, find-my-way) do not preserve this — they use static > param > catch-all priority, which is why they can't be used as a Starlette replacement without behaviour change.

Performance

Measured against three public OpenAPI specs (Stripe, GitHub REST v3 and Kubernetes). For every route a match probe (dynamic params filled with valid values) and a miss probe (dynamic section perturbed; verified against Starlette's own matcher so collisions don't pollute the workload) is generated; the full workload is looped to ≥ 20 k iterations, best-of-3:

spec	routes	ffroute hit	starlette hit	hit speedup	ffroute miss	starlette miss	miss speedup
Stripe	414	95 ns	11 418 ns	120×	65 ns	22 956 ns	355×
GitHub	788	112 ns	23 501 ns	210×	42 ns	43 039 ns	1022×
Kubernetes	542	127 ns	15 496 ns	122×	80 ns	31 723 ns	398×

The miss speedup is even larger than the hit speedup because a trie fails fast at the first non-matching segment, while Starlette has to execute every compiled regex before concluding "no match". One-time build is 50–200× faster too (Stripe: 0.13 ms vs 8.3 ms; GitHub: 0.22 ms vs 22.5 ms).

Reproduce — or regenerate the table above — with benchmarks/openapi_bench.py:

uv sync --group benchmarks
uv run --no-sync python benchmarks/openapi_bench.py                 # print
uv run --no-sync python benchmarks/openapi_bench.py --update-readme # rewrite the table above

Why this is fast (vs other approaches)

On a synthetic 740-route table with 50 k weighted URLs (best-of-5, Python 3.14.0rc2), ffroute is measured against the design space of routing implementations — pure-Python tries, regex variants, batch vs single-call:

implementation	build (ms)	ns/req	req/s	vs Starlette
starlette.routing.Router (linear regex scan)	130	2971	0.34 M	1.0×
linear regex, no scope dict	59	953	1.05 M	3.1×
pure-Python segment trie	1.8	668	1.50 M	4.4×
ffroute (PyO3, batch)	0.7	115	8.7 M	26×
ffroute (PyO3, single-call)	0.5	101	9.9 M	29×

The single-call number is the realistic one — ASGI calls the matcher once per request, not in a batch. A pure-Python trie alone already wins 4.4×, so most of the gap isn't "Rust vs Python" — it's "trie vs linear scan". The Rust implementation is then ~7× on top of that. A trie also removes the O(N) factor: the linear scan climbs 745 → 2731 ns/req as N goes 100 → 3000, while ffroute stays ~98 ns regardless of N.

The 740-route numbers are lower than the OpenAPI numbers above because the synthetic corpus is dominated by short static prefixes (faster for both matchers); the real OpenAPI tables have deeper paths and more dynamic segments, which slow Starlette's per-route regex scan disproportionately.

Why a custom router (vs matchit / httprouter / find-my-way)?

A native radix router from another ecosystem can't be dropped into FastAPI without changing behaviour:

• httprouter (Go) panics when a static segment and a param share a position (/x/bulk/ vs /x/{id}/) — the everyday FastAPI route model. It rejected 53 % of a 740-route table in our measurements.
• matchit (axum) and find-my-way (Fastify) use static > param > catch-all priority, returning a different match than Starlette for the shadowing cases above.

ffroute implements a min-index segment trie precisely to reproduce Starlette's first-registered semantics byte-for-byte.

Conformance

tests/test_conformance.py is a differential test whose oracle is Starlette's real compile_path / Route.path_regex. Cases are lifted from starlette/tests/test_routing.py (typed convertors, /path-with-parentheses({param:int}), the intra-segment /{username}:disable, str-param shadowing), FastAPI's documented fixed-before-param priority, and trailing-slash edge cases, plus a synthetic 5 000-path fuzz over an algorithmically-generated route corpus.

tests/test_ffrouter.py covers the speedup / FFRouter integration — mount + APIRouter + include_router combinations, method dispatch (→ 405), nested Mounts, FastAPI's /openapi.json round-trip, and the lazy-import error message when Starlette isn't installed.

See examples/starlette_app.py and examples/fastapi_app.py for runnable apps that enable FFRouter in one line.

Development

uv sync --all-groups               # install dev deps incl. maturin
uv run maturin develop --release   # build the Rust extension into the venv
uv run pytest                      # run the test suite

See the Makefile for additional targets (make help).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.