tinyrpc 1.0.4

A small, modular, transport and protocol neutral RPC library that, among other things, supports JSON-RPC and zmq.

Note

Tinyrpc has been revised.

The current version will support Python3 only. Have a look at the 0.9.x version if you need Python2 support. Python2 support will be dropped completely when Python2 retires, somewhere in 2020.

Motivation

As of this writing (in Jan 2013) there are a few jsonrpc libraries already out there on PyPI, most of them handling one specific use case (e.g. json via WSGI, using Twisted, or TCP-sockets).

None of the libraries, however, makes it easy to reuse the jsonrpc-parsing bits and substitute a different transport (i.e. going from json via TCP to an implementation using WebSockets or 0mq).

In the end, all these libraries have their own dispatching interfaces and a custom implementation of handling jsonrpc. Today (march 2019) that hasn’t changed.

tinyrpc aims to do better by dividing the problem into cleanly interchangeable parts that allow easy addition of new transport methods, RPC protocols or dispatchers.

Example:

To create a server process receiving and handling JSONRPC requests do:

import gevent
import gevent.pywsgi
import gevent.queue
from tinyrpc.protocols.jsonrpc import JSONRPCProtocol
from tinyrpc.transports.wsgi import WsgiServerTransport
from tinyrpc.server.gevent import RPCServerGreenlets
from tinyrpc.dispatch import RPCDispatcher

dispatcher = RPCDispatcher()
transport = WsgiServerTransport(queue_class=gevent.queue.Queue)

# start wsgi server as a background-greenlet
wsgi_server = gevent.pywsgi.WSGIServer(('127.0.0.1', 5000), transport.handle)
gevent.spawn(wsgi_server.serve_forever)

rpc_server = RPCServerGreenlets(transport, JSONRPCProtocol(), dispatcher)

@dispatcher.public
def reverse_string(s):
    return s[::-1]

# in the main greenlet, run our rpc_server
rpc_server.serve_forever()

The corresponding client code looks like:

from tinyrpc.protocols.jsonrpc import JSONRPCProtocol
from tinyrpc.transports.http import HttpPostClientTransport
from tinyrpc import RPCClient

rpc_client = RPCClient(
    JSONRPCProtocol(),
    HttpPostClientTransport('http://127.0.0.1:5000/'))

remote_server = rpc_client.get_proxy()

# call a method called 'reverse_string' with a single string argument
result = remote_server.reverse_string('Hello, World!')

print("Server answered:", result)

Documentation

You’ll quickly find that tinyrpc has more documentation and tests than core code, hence the name. See the documentation at <https://tinyrpc.readthedocs.org> for more details, especially the Structure-section to get a birds-eye view.

Installation

pip install tinyrpc

will install tinyrpc with its default dependencies.

Optional dependencies

Depending on the protocols and transports you want to use additional dependencies are required. You can instruct pip to install these dependencies by specifying extras to the basic install command.

pip install tinyrpc[httpclient, wsgi]

will install tinyrpc with dependencies for the httpclient and wsgi transports.

Available extras are:

Option	Needed to use objects of class
gevent	optional in RPCClient, required by RPCServerGreenlets
httpclient	HttpPostClientTransport, HttpWebSocketClientTransport
msgpack	implements MSGPACKRPCProtocol
jsonext	optional in JSONRPCProtocol
websocket	WSServerTransport
wsgi	WsgiServerTransport
zmq	ZmqServerTransport, ZmqClientTransport

New in version 1.0.4

Tinyrpc now supports the MSGPACK RPC protocol in addition to JSON-RPC.