A pyramid plugin that describes a pyramid application URL hierarchy via inspection.
Project description
A pyramid plugin that describes a pyramid application URL hierarchy, either by responding to an HTTP request or on the command line, via application inspection and reflection. It has built-in support for plain-text hierachies, reStructuredText, HTML, JSON, YAML, WADL, and XML, however other custom formats can be added easily.
Exposing an application’s structure via HTTP is useful to dynamically generate an API description (via WADL, JSON, or YAML) or to create documentation directly from source code.
On the command-line it is useful to get visibility into an application’s URL structure and hierarchy so that it can be understood and maintained.
TL;DR
Install:
$ pip install pyramid-describeCommand-line example:
$ pdescribe example.ini --format txt
/ # The application root.
├── contact/ # Contact manager.
│ ├── <POST> # Creates a new 'contact' object.
│ └── {CONTACTID} # RESTful access to a specific contact.
│ ├── <DELETE> # Delete this contact.
│ ├── <GET> # Get this contact's details.
│ └── <PUT> # Update this contact's details.
├── login # Authenticate against the server.
└── logout # Remove authentication tokens.Examples of the above application in all other formats with built-in support are available at: text (pure-ASCII), reStructuredText, HTML, JSON, YAML, WADL, and XML.
Configuration
When pyramid-describe is integrated via inclusion (e.g. config.include('pyramid_describe')), the module will auto-create DescribeController’s as defined in the application’s settings. The following configurations can be specified there (note that the first one controls the prefix set on the others):
describe.prefixes : list(str), default: ‘describe’
Defines the prefix or the list of prefixes that pyramid-describe settings will be searched for in the configuration. For each prefix, a separate DescribeController will be created and attached to the application router. The following example attaches two controllers at /desc-one and /desc-two:
[app:main] describe.prefixes = describe-one describe-two describe-one.attach = /desc-one # other `describe-one` options... describe-two.attach = /desc-two # other `describe-two` options...{PREFIX}.attach : str, default: /describe
Specifies the path to attach the controller to the current application’s router. Note that this uses the add_controller directive, and ensures that pyramid-controllers has already been added via an explicit call to config.include(). This path will serve the default format: to request alternate formats, use “PATH/FILENAME.EXT” (where FILENAME is controlled by the {PREFIX}.filename configuration and EXT specifies the format) or use the “format=EXT” query-string. Examples using the default settings:
http://localhost:8080/describe/application.txt http://localhost:8080/describe/application.json http://localhost:8080/describe?format=json{PREFIX}.filename : str, default: application
Sets the filename base component. Typically, this is set to the application’s name and should probably include the application version.
{PREFIX}.redirect : str, default: null
Similar to the filename option, this option sets a filename base component that will redirect (with a 302) to the current filename. This allows there to be a persistent known location that can be used if the filename option is dynamic or changes with revisions.
{PREFIX}.inspect : str, default: /
Specifies the top-level URL to start the application inspection at.
{PREFIX}.include : list(str), default: null
The include option lists regular expressions that an endpoint must match at least one of in order to be included in the output. This option can be used with the exclude option, in which case endpoints are first matched for inclusion, then matched for exclusion (i.e. the order is “allow,deny” in apache terminology).
{PREFIX}.exclude : list(str), default: null
The converse of the include option.
{PREFIX}.filters : list(resolve-spec), default: null
This option specifies a callable (or string in python dot syntax) or list of callables (or strings) that filter and modify the endpoints before they are rendered to the requested format. Each endpoint that is selected for inclusion for rendering is first passed through each filter and replaced by the return value from the call. This is done for each filter in turn. If any filter returns None, the endpoint is removed from the selection list.
These filters are intended to allow two primary features:
Access control: a filter can inspect the endpoint and the requesting user and determine if the endpoint should be made visible. If not, it should return None.
Custom documentation parsing: a filter can parse the endpoints’ doc attribute (which gets auto-populated with the endpoint’s python documentation string), and extract other information such as expected parameters, return values, and exceptions thrown. Typically, this is done with something like numpydoc.
Filters are passed two parameters: an entry object (see pyramid_describe.entry.Entry for detailed attributes) and an options dictionary. The latter has many interesting attributes, including a reference to the current request.
TODO: add documentation about entry and options.
