mini-racer 0.9.0

Minimal, modern embedded V8 for Python.

Minimal, modern embedded V8 for Python.

Full documentation.

Features

• Latest ECMAScript support
• Web Assembly support
• Unicode support
• Thread safe
• Re-usable contexts

MiniRacer can be easily used by Django or Flask projects to minify assets, run babel or WASM modules.

New home! (As of March 2024)

PyMiniRacer was created by Sqreen, and originally lived at https://github.com/sqreen/PyMiniRacer with the PyPI package py-mini-racer.

As of March 2024, after a few years without updates, I have reached out to the original Sqreen team. We agreed that I should fork PyMiniRacer, giving it a new home at https://github.com/bpcreech/PyMiniRacer with a new PyPI package mini-racer (note: no py-). It now has a new version for the first time since 2021!

Examples

MiniRacer is straightforward to use:

    $ pip install mini-racer

and then:

    $ python3
    >>> from py_mini_racer import MiniRacer
    >>> ctx = MiniRacer()
    >>> ctx.eval("1+1")
    2
    >>> ctx.eval("var x = {company: 'Sqreen'}; x.company")
    'Sqreen'
    >>> print(ctx.eval("'❤'"))
    ❤
    >>> ctx.eval("var fun = () => ({ foo: 1 });")

Variables are kept inside of a context:

    >>> ctx.eval("x.company")
    'Sqreen'

While eval only supports returning primitive data types such as strings, call supports returning composite types such as objects:

    >>> ctx.call("fun")
    {'foo': 1}

Composite values are serialized using JSON. Use a custom JSON encoder when sending non-JSON encodable parameters:

    import json

    from datetime import datetime

    class CustomEncoder(json.JSONEncoder):

            def default(self, obj):
                if isinstance(obj, datetime):
                    return obj.isoformat()

                return json.JSONEncoder.default(self, obj)

    >>> ctx.eval("var f = function(args) { return args; }")
    >>> ctx.call("f", datetime.now(), encoder=CustomEncoder)
    '2017-03-31T16:51:02.474118'

MiniRacer is ES6 capable:

    >>> ctx.execute("[1,2,3].includes(5)")
    False

MiniRacer supports the ECMA Intl API:

    # Indonesian dates!
    >>> ctx.eval('Intl.DateTimeFormat(["ban", "id"]).format(new Date())')
    '16/3/2024'

V8 heap information can be retrieved:

    >>> ctx.heap_stats()
    {'total_physical_size': 1613896,
     'used_heap_size': 1512520,
     'total_heap_size': 3997696,
     'total_heap_size_executable': 3145728,
     'heap_size_limit': 1501560832}

A WASM example is available in the tests.

Compatibility

PyMiniRacer is compatible with Python 3.8-3.12 and is based on ctypes.

PyMiniRacer is distributed using wheels on PyPI. The wheels are intended to provide compatibility with:

OS	x86_64	aarch64
macOS ≥ 10.9	✓	✓
Windows ≥ 10	✓	✖
Ubuntu ≥ 20.04	✓	✓
Debian ≥ 11	✓	✓
RHEL ≥ 8	✓	✓
other Linuxes with glibc ≥ 2.31	✓	✓
Alpine ≥ 3.19	✓	✓
other Linux with musl ≥ 1.2	✓	✓

If you have a up-to-date pip and it doesn't use a wheel, you might have an environment for which no wheel is built. Please open an issue.

Developing and releasing PyMiniRacer

See the contribution guide.

Credits

Built with love by Sqreen.

PyMiniRacer launch was described in this blog post.

PyMiniRacer is inspired by mini_racer, built for the Ruby world by Sam Saffron.

In 2024, PyMiniRacer was revived, and adopted by Ben Creech. Upon discussion with the original Sqreen authors, we decided to re-launch PyMiniRacer as a fork under https://github.com/bpcreech/PyMiniRacer and https://pypi.org/project/mini-racer/.

Release history

0.9.0 (2024-03-30)

• Revamped JS execution model to be out-of-thread. Python/C++ interaction now happens via callbacks.

• Consequently, Control+C (KeyboardInterrupt) now interrupts JS execution.

• Hardened C++-side thread safety model, resolving potential race conditions introduced in v0.8.1 (but not actually reported as happening anywhere).

• Further improved JS exception reporting; exception reports now show the offending code where possible.

• Introduced timeout_sec parameter to eval, call, and execute to replace the timeout, which unfortunately uses milliseconds (unlike the Python standard library). In the future we may emit deprecation warnings for use of timeout.

0.8.1 (2024-03-23)

• A series of C++ changes which should not impact the behavior of PyMiniRacer:
• Refactoring how we use V8 by inverting the control flow. Before we had function evaluations which ran and drained the message loop. Now we have an always-running message loop into which we inject function evaluations. This seems to be the preferred way to use V8. This is not expected to cause any behavior changes (but, in tests, makes microtask competion more consistent).
• Refactoring the C++ implementation into multiple components to make startup and teardown logic more robust.
• Added tests for the existing fast-function-call path.
• Also, simplified Python conversion of C++ evaluation results.

0.8.0 (2024-03-18)

• General overhaul of C++ implementation to better adhere to modern best practice. This should have no visible impact except for the following notes...
• Exposed the hard memory limit as a context-specific (as opposed to eval-specific) limit, since that's how it worked all along anyway. The max_memory eval argument still works for backwards compatibility purposes.
• Correct message type of some exceptions to str instead of bytes (they should all be str now).
• Added better messages for JS parse errors.
• Added backtraces for more JS errors.
• Added some really basic Python typing.

0.7.0 (2024-03-06)

• Update V8 to 12.2
• Drop Python 2 support
• Fix small Python 3.12 issue and add testing for Python 3.9-3.12
• Add aarch64 support for Mac and Linux
• Revamp DLL loading to be compliant with Python 3.9-style resource loading. This may present a small breaking change for advanced usage; the EXTENSION_PATH and EXTENSION_NAME module variables, and MiniRacer.v8_flags and MiniRacer.ext class variable have all been removed.
• Add support for the ECMAScript internalization API and thus the ECMA Intl API
• Use fast startup snapshots
• Switch from setuptools to Hatch
• Switch from tox to Hatch
• Switch from flake8 and isort to Hatch's wrapper of Ruff
• Switch from Sphinx to mkdocs (and hatch-mkdocs)
• Switch from unittest to pytest
• Add ARCHITECTURE.md and lots of code comments

0.6.0 (2020-04-20)

• Update V8 to 8.9
• Optimize function calls without arguments
• Switch V8 to single threaded mode to avoid crashes after fork
• Switch to strict mode by default
• Revamp documentation

0.5.0 (2020-02-25)

• Update V8 to 8.8

0.4.0 (2020-09-22)

• Universal wheels for Linux, Mac and Windows
• Fallback to source package for Alpine Linux

0.3.0 (2020-06-29)

• Introduce a strict mode
• Fix array conversion when size changes dynamically (CVE-2020-25489)

0.2.0 (2020-03-11)

• Support for Alpine Linux
• Avoid pip private modules in setup.py

0.2.0b1 (2020-01-09)

• Support for Windows 64 bits
• Support for Python 3.8
• Upgrade V8 to 7.8
• Support soft memory limits

0.1.18 (2019-01-04)

• Support memory and time limits

0.1.17 (2018-19-12)

• Upgrade libv8
• Fix a memory leak

0.1.16 (2018-07-11)

• Add wheel for Python without PyMalloc

0.1.15 (2018-06-18)

• Add wheel for Python 3.7

0.1.14 (2018-05-25)

• Add support for pip 10
• Update package metadata

0.1.13 (2018-03-15)

• Add heap_stats function
• Fix issue with returned strings containing null bytes

0.1.12 (2018-17-04)

• Remove dependency to enum

0.1.11 (2017-07-11)

• Add compatibility for centos6

0.1.10 (2017-03-31)

• Add the possibility to pass a custom JSON encoder in call.

0.1.9 (2017-03-24)

• Fix the compilation for Ubuntu 12.04 and glibc < 2.17.

0.1.8 (2017-03-02)

• Update targets build for better compatibility with old Mac OS X and linux platforms.

0.1.7 (2016-10-04)

• Improve general performances of the JS execution.
• Add the possibility to build a different version of V8 (for example with debug symbols).
• Fix a conflict that could happens between statically linked libraries and dynamic ones.

0.1.6 (2016-08-12)

• Add error message when py_mini_racer sdist fails to build asking to update pip in order to download the pre-compiled wheel instead of the source distribution.

0.1.5 (2016-08-04)

• Build py_mini_racer against a static Python. When built against a shared library python, it doesn't work with a static Python.

0.1.4 (2016-08-04)

• Ensure JSEvalException message is converted to unicode

0.1.3 (2016-08-04)

• Fix extension loading for python3
• Add a make target for building distributions (sdist + wheels)
• Fix eval conversion for python 3

0.1.2 (2016-08-03)

• Fix date support
• Fix Dockerfile for generating python3 wheels

0.1.1 (2016-08-02)

• Fix sdist distribution.

0.1.0 (2016-08-01)

• First release on PyPI.