Dynamic Class Loader

One of the issues developers can encounter when developing in Python is the time taken to deploy changes. You can help reduce this time by dynamically loading some of your Python classes. This allows you to make iterative changes to just the area of your application that you’re working on.

For example, if you’re creating code that requires lots of small changes and want to see your results quickly, without needing to redeploy the Cloud Function each time, then this solution is for you. Put the code you want to change in a class you can dynamically load, and redeploy the Cloud Function once calling this new class. You can now copy the new class to your chosen storage and test iteratively by just changing the file in storage without having to redeploy the Cloud Function.

Installation and Setup

The library is available on PyPi as python-dynamic-loader. To install it into your local python environment, simple add the following line to your requirements.txt:

python-dynamic-loader>=1.0.0

Usage

The system relies on the classes extending the DynamicClass object, which has in it the loader, and suggests a method to override to make generic loading easier.

How to create a dynamically loadable class

A very simple example can be found in the command_files folder.

  1 from typing import Mapping
  2 from dynamic import DynamicClass
  3
  4
  5 class HelloWorld(DynamicClass):
  6 """A simple dynamic Hello World."""
  7
  8 def run(self, **attributes: Mapping[str, str]) -> str:
  9  """Runs the command.
 10
 11  The is the mandatory implementation of the `run` method in
 12  `DynamicClass`. It is the only method that the framework will call.
 13
 14  The attributes are passed as Python keyword args and will vary
 15  according to whatever the user needs.
 16
 17  Returns:
 18     Dict[str, Any]: the result of the command
 19  """
 20  return "Hello world!"

So your named class must extend DynamicClass, as shown on line 5.

You should then implement the run method, which at a minimum should return the result of the class. This run method is only a placeholder, you could create any method you want.

Once this is done, you need to call the code when needed.

  1 import dynamic
  2
  3 processor = DynamicClass.install(module_name='my_module',
  4                                  class_name='HelloWorld',
  5                                  storage=dynamic.CloudStorage,
  6                                  bucket='my-gcs-bucket')
  7 processor().run()

As you can see, the first step is to install the new class. This loads the code from the chosen storage location (dynamic.CloudStorage in this example) and returns the class object.

install takes 3 mandatory parameters and any number of optional ones that will be passed on to the storage object.

You can then instantiate the object (processor()) and call the run method, or any other method you have defined.

The module is reloaded each time, so the latest version will always be used.

Where To Store Your Code: SourceGrabbers

Provided SourceGrabbers

CloudStorage

This is to grab the code from a bucket in Google Cloud Storage (GCS). CloudStorage takes one parameter:

The files must be stored in the bucket, with the .py extension as normal text files. As an example, the above sample code would be stored as hello.py, like this:

SecretManager

This fetches the code from a secret stored in Google Secret Manager in plain text. It takes no additional parameters.

The file is uploaded as a secret to secret manager with the name of the module just as is. For example, the above sample code would be stored in Secret Manager as a secret called "hello", and the value of the secret should be the text content of the class. Your Secret Manager should look like this:

Secret Manager can store up to 64kb of text which sdhould be large enough for most uses.

LocalStorage

Mostly useful for testing, this is to grab the code from a local folder on the user's local drive. LocalStorage takes one parameter:

The files must be stored in the folder, with the .py extension as normal source files. As an example, the above sample code would be stored as hello.py.

Creating your own SourceGrabber

Any location where you can fetch plain text from can be used as a source for the code to be loaded dynamically - Amazon S3, Fiurestore, Big Query etc. would all be decent choices.

In order to create a SourceGrabber you need to create a class extending dynamic.SourceGrabber.

It must implement at a minimum the fetch_source method, which must return the source to be loaded as a str.

It can, in addition, include an __init__ method which will be passed any additional startup parameters given to the install method (see above). If you intend to do this, remember to always include the **unused as the final parameter so that unexpected parameters will not cause instantiation failures.

Examples of SourceGrabbers can be seen in the dynamic.source_grabbers module.