portapyc 3.3.0.post4

PortaPyC (pronounced port-a-pike) is a Python 3 port of RPyC 3.3.0 that preserves the RPyC wire protocol. Its primary use case is connecting matching and differing Python runtimes: a Python 3 application can communicate with a legacy Python 2 RPyC server (and vice versa) even when that server cannot be upgraded. Without a compatibility layer, Python 2/3 runtime and data-model differences would normally prevent this connection.

PortaPyC provides transparent, symmetric remote procedure calls: code on one machine can call functions, access objects, and use services on another machine as if they were local. This makes it useful for lightweight distributed computing, remote administration, test control, and integrating new Python 3 applications with systems that still depend on Python 2.

PortaPyC keeps the RPyC programming model while adding Python 3 support. It supports direct TCP connections, SSL-wrapped connections, SSH tunnels, standard-input/output pipes, subprocess and thread helpers, and optional service discovery through a registry.

Installation

python -m pip install portapyc

The package requires Python 3.7 or newer. Install the documentation dependencies with:

python -m pip install "portapyc[docs]"

Cross-version compatibility

Start a classic server on the machine that should expose Python:

rpyc_classic.py --port 18812

Connect to it from a Python 3 client:

import portapyc

connection = portapyc.classic.connect("server.example.com", port=18812)
print(connection.eval("1 + 2"))
print(connection.modules.os.listdir("."))
connection.close()

The same approach works when the PortaPyC endpoint is the server and a compatible Python 2 RPyC client connects to it. Compatibility is based on the RPyC 3.3.0 protocol, not arbitrary combinations of RPyC releases.

Changes compared with RPyC

PortaPyC is based on RPyC 3.3.0, but its implementation is adapted for Python 3 and cross-version communication:

• A compatibility layer isolates Python 2/3 differences in execution, built-in types, iterators, queues, threads, sockets, and platform polling.
• The Brine protocol serializer handles Python 2 str/unicode and Python 3 bytes/str representations on the wire.
• Optional convert_str connection configuration converts received Python 2 byte strings to Python 3 text, or Python 3 text to Python 2 strings, when application-level text conversion is needed.
• Protocol, proxy, exception, iterator, and pickle handling are kept aligned with the RPyC 3.3.0 protocol so remote objects remain usable across runtimes.
• The package exposes the familiar RPyC-style API under portapyc, with Python 3 connection factories for TCP, SSL, SSH, pipes, subprocesses, threads, and discovery.

These changes target interoperability with RPyC 3.3.0. They do not make different, unrelated RPyC protocol versions universally compatible.

Quick start

For an application-specific service, connect directly and use the remote root object:

import portapyc

connection = portapyc.connect("server.example.com", 18812)
result = connection.root.calculate_total(10, 20)
connection.close()

Documentation

See this project's documentation on ReadTheDocs or read RPyC's documentation for information about the connection model, service discovery, security options, and the public API reference.

You can also build this project's documentation locally with Sphinx. After installing the documentation dependencies, run the following command in the project root directory to build the HTML documentation:

pip install portapyc[docs]
python -m sphinx -b html docs docs/_build/html

License

PortaPyC is distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE.