millwork

A modern UI framework for Python

A page is a Python function of the session's state. A handler changes the state, the page renders again, and the browser receives a patch. The React bundle ships inside the package, so a project is Python only.

import millwork as mw
from millwork import ui
from pydantic import BaseModel


class State(BaseModel):
    clicks: int = 0


app = mw.App("hello", state=State)


@app.page("/")
def home(s: mw.Session[State]) -> ui.Component:
    return ui.Page(
        ui.Text(f"Clicked {s.state.clicks} times."),
        ui.Button("Add one", on_click=lambda s, _: setattr(s.state, "clicks", s.state.clicks + 1)),
    )

uv add millwork  # or `pip install millwork`
uv run millwork run app.py

What is in the box

• A catalogue of components on shadcn/ui: layout, text, inputs, feedback, tables, charts, forms from Pydantic models, files, tasks with progress, and a chat surface that streams replies from Python.
• One model of state. Python owns the state; a control is owned by Python or by the browser, and the page says which.
• Long work as tasks, with progress, steps and cancellation drawn by the page, and chat replies that stream text, reasoning and tool steps.
• Files over the session's socket. Uploads, downloads and inline images travel on the same connection as everything else, so replicas need no sticky routing and no shared storage.
• Sign-in with password, OAuth and proxy-header providers behind one on_login hook, and a theme file in the shadcn token vocabulary for colors, fonts and logos.
• A test harness that drives a page without a browser: open it, click, change, submit, and read what the tab would have received.
• One process to run. millwork run serves an app on a port or a unix socket, behind a proxy and under a path prefix, with a health route for the host.

The manual

The manual is at millwork-ui.com. It is a millwork app: every example in it runs, with the Python code beside it. The chapters cover pages and routing, state and handlers, signing in, theming, testing and running, and every component has a live example. It also runs locally:

uv run millwork docs

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8008.

Status

millwork is still in beta.

Developing millwork

Python is managed with uv, the bundle with pnpm; only bundle/ needs Node.

uv run pytest -q                       # the Python suite
uv run mypy src && uv run ruff check src tests
pnpm -C bundle exec tsc --noEmit       # the bundle's types
CI=1 pnpm -C bundle exec vitest run    # the bundle's unit tests
CI=1 pnpm -C bundle build              # rebuilds src/millwork/_bundle/dist

A change to the bundle is committed together with the rebuilt dist, so every checkout runs without Node. That includes a Dependabot bump of the bundle's packages: apply it, rebuild, look at the manual, and commit the dist with it, or CI refuses the branch. The manual's pages under src/millwork/manual/pages are the gallery a bundle upgrade is judged against.

Releasing

A release is a tag. Write the version's section in CHANGELOG.md, set the version with uv version, commit, tag it v plus the version and push the tag. The release workflow waits for approval, checks the tagged commit, builds the wheel, publishes it to PyPI and makes the GitHub release from the changelog section. The published release then deploys the hosted manual from that version on PyPI; deploy/ holds its image and Fly configuration, and flyctl deploy ./deploy --build-arg MILLWORK_VERSION=<version> deploys one by hand.

License

Apache-2.0.