Guide¶
Installation¶
Assuming you are running Linux or OS X and are familiar with pip, installation is as easy as:
$ pip install cosmic
If you would like to work on the bleeding edge of Cosmic development, you can clone the repo using git:
$ git clone https://github.com/cosmic-api/cosmic.py.git cosmic-py
Then to install the current version (ideally you want to do this in a virtualenv):
$ cd cosmic-py
$ python setup.py develop
If you are not yet familiar with virtualenv, it is an indespensible tool for Python development. It lets you create isolated Python environments for every project you are working on. This means that different projects can depend on different versions of the same library.
What’s in an API?¶
A web API is:
- An interface through which a server can share data and functionality with clients over the internet.
- A component of the server architecture that glues the database and business logic to HTTP.
In the context of Cosmic, an API is represented, unsurprisingly, by an
instance of the BaseAPI
class. On the server, we use
the API
subclass, and on the client we use the
APIClient
subclass.
The API object on the server and the API object are almost identical. The difference is that for every server endpoint, there is a hook into the server’s database or business logic, whereas each client endpoint replaces this with an HTTP call.
The client get created automatically from a JSON spec. The format of this
spec is defined by the Teleport type APISpec
. Let’s see
what the spec looks like:
>>> from cosmic.types import APISpec
>>> from cosmic.api import API
>>> trivia = API("trivia", homepage="http://example.com")
>>> APISpec.to_json(trivia.spec)
{
u'name': 'trivia',
u'homepage': 'http://example.com',
u'actions': {u'map': {}, u'order': []},
u'models': {u'map': {}, u'order': []}
}
Let’s take a look at what’s inside.
First, there is the basic metadata: the API name and homepage. The name of the API should be unique. Though this is not yet enforced by Cosmic, we plan on indexing Cosmic APIs on our website in which case it will become a requirement.
Then, the API spec contains descriptions of actions and models. These will be explained in detail in the next two sections.
Auto-generated Clients¶
In Cosmic, creating an API client is very easy. If you run the API from the
tutorial, you can create a client in another file simply by subclassing
APIClient
like so:
from cosmic.client import APIClient
class WordsClient(APIClient):
base_url = 'http://127.0.0.1:5000'
words = WordsClient()
print words.actions.pluralize('pencil')
You can use this subclass to override some HTTP functions necessary for
authentication, for example, to add an Authorization
header to every
request.
RPC via Actions¶
See also
ActionEndpoint
for HTTP spec.
RPC stands for remote procedure call. It allows remote clients to call
procedures (functions) in your code. These are commonly implemented as POST
handlers on action-style URLs, such as POST /register_user
. Cosmic goes
along with this convention, listening to POST requests on /actions/<name>
URLs.
So what’s in an action? Clearly, we need a name in order to generate the URL. But apart from the name, Cosmic also expects type definitions for the input and output values of the action. These definitions are used for serialization, validation and help with generating documentation. Here is the Teleport schema that describes an action:
Struct([
optional("accepts", Schema),
optional("returns", Schema),
optional("doc", String)
])
Actions are registered with the action()
decorator:
>>> from cosmic.types import Array, Integer
>>> @mathy.action(accepts=Array(Integer), returns=Integer)
... def add(numbers):
... return sum(numbers)
...
>>>
The function used in the action is perfectly usable:
>>> add([1, 2, 3])
6
But now there is another way of accessing it:
>>> mathy.actions.sum([1, 2, 3])
6
Both accepts and returns are optional. If no accepts schema is provided, the action will take no input data, and if the returns schema is not provided, the action will return nothing when it completes.
Normally, the action function is expected to take a single non-keyword
argument. If your action needs to take multiple arguments, use the Teleport
Struct
type:
@mathy.action(accepts=Struct([
required(u'numerator', Integer),
required(u'denominator', Integer),
]), returns=Integer)
def divide(numerator, denominator):
return numerator / denominator
This may be called as:
>>> mathy.actions.divide(numerator=10, denominator=5)
2
REST via Models¶
Models are data type definitions attached to an API, they use Teleport schemas to describe their data.
Let’s take a look at the model object:
from cosmic.api import API
from cosmic.models import BaseModel
places = API('places')
@places.model
class Address(BaseModel):
properties = [
required(u"number", Integer),
optional(u"street", String),
optional(u"city", String)
]
As you can see, a model class should inherit from
BaseModel
and in order to register it with an API, you
must use the model()
decorator on it. Once a model has
been registered with an API, it becomes accessible as part of the
models
namespace, for example places.models.Address
.
Once registered with an API, a model becomes available in the
models
namespace. The beauty of this namespace
is that it is identical on the client and server.
Models can be used to create REST-ful endpoints. A model roughly corresponds to a database table. If you want to give clients access to objects of the data type defined by the model, you also need to define a set of CRUD methods that Cosmic will turn into HTTP endpoints.
The links parameter describes relationships between models. A link from one model to another is similar to a foreign key in a relational database.
Links are defined similarly to properties:
places = API('places')
@places.model
class City(BaseModel):
properties = [
optional(u"name", String)
]
@places.model
class Address(BaseModel):
properties = [
required(u"number", Integer),
required(u"street", String),
]
links = [
required(u"city", City)
]
These models are merely data type definitions, they do not have REST endpoints because they are not connected to any database.
If apart from defining a data type we also want to provide access to a
collection of objects of this data type, there are 5 methods that Cosmic
allows us to override. These methods correspond to 5 HTTP endpoints.
Methods must be declared by adding their name to the
methods
property on the model class.
get_by_id¶
See also
GetByIdEndpoint
for HTTP spec.
The simplest method to implement is
get_by_id()
. It takes a single parameter (an id
is always a string) and returns a dict representing the object. If the object
doesn’t exist, it must raise NotFound
.
from cosmic.exceptions import NotFound
places = API('places')
@places.model
class City(BaseModel):
methods = ["get_by_id", "create", "update", "delete", "get_list"]
properties = [
optional(u"name", String)
]
@classmethod
def get_by_id(cls, id):
try:
return cities[id]
except KeyError:
raise NotFound
cities = {
"0": {"name": "Toronto"},
"1": {"name": "San Francisco"},
}
As you can see, Cosmic doesn’t care what kind of database you use, as long as the method returns the right value. Now if we want to use this method, we can do, on the client or server:
>>> city = places.models.City.get_by_id("1")
{"name": "San Francisco"}
create¶
See also
CreateEndpoint
for HTTP spec.
The create()
method takes a patch (a model
representation where every field is optional) and returns a tuple with the new
id and representation:
@classmethod
def create(cls, patch):
new_id = str(len(cities))
cities[new_id] = patch
return new_id, cities[new_id]
update¶
See also
UpdateEndpoint
for HTTP spec.
The update()
method takes an id and patch and
either applies the patch, returning the new representation, or raises
NotFound
.
@classmethod
def update(cls, id, patch):
if id not in cities:
raise NotFound
cities[id] = patch
return cities[id]
delete¶
See also
DeleteEndpoint
for HTTP spec.
The delete()
method, upon deleting the object,
returns nothing. It raises NotFound
if the object
does not exist:
@classmethod
def delete(cls, id):
if id not in cities:
raise NotFound
del cities[id]
get_list¶
See also
GetListEndpoint
for HTTP spec.
The get_list()
method takes keyword arguments
as specified by the query_fields model property. This schema is used to
serialize them into a URL query string with the help of
URLParams
.
query_fields = [
optional(u"country", String)
]
@classmethod
def get_list(cls, country=None):
if country is None:
return cities.items()
elif country == "Canada":
return [("0", cities["0"])]
elif country == "USA":
return [("1", cities["1"])]
else:
return []
The return value of this function is a (possibly empty) list of tuples where the first element is the object id and the second is the object representation.
You are free to invent your own pagination schemes using custom query fields.
Often it will be useful to return metadata along with the items, for example,
the total count if the list is paginated, or a timestamp. You can specify this
by including the list_metadata
attribute.
list_metadata = [
required(u"total_count", Integer)
]
@classmethod
def get_list(cls):
metadata = {"total_count": len(cities)}
return (cities.items(), metadata)
As you can see, when list_metadata
is specified, the return value
of get_list()
is a tuple, where the first item is the list, and the
second is a dict containing the metadata.
Serving¶
For development, run()
is fine, but for production, you
should use a WSGI server such as Gunicorn. In order
to do this, use Server
to expose the raw WSGI
application.
from cosmic.api import API
from cosmic.http import Server
from cosmic.types import *
words = API('words')
@words.action(accepts=String, returns=String)
def pluralize(word):
if word.endswith('y'):
return word[:-1] + 'ies'
else:
return word + 's'
wsgi_app = Server(words).wsgi_app
Now you can run it in your favorite web server:
$ gunicorn -b 127.0.0.1:5001 words:wsgi_app
Authentication¶
Currently, Cosmic does not provide a standard authentication mechanism. It does provide powerful HTTP hooks which can be used to implement different authentication schemes.
On the server, you can use standard WSGI middleware, and you can subclass
Server
:
from flask import make_response
from cosmic.api import API
from cosmic.http import Server, error_response
planetarium = API("planetarium")
class PlanetariumServer(Server):
def view(self, endpoint, request, **url_args):
if request.headers.get('Authorization', None) != 'secret':
return error_response("Unauthorized", 401)
return super(PlanetariumServer, self).view(endpoint, request, **url_args)
wsgi_app = PlanetariumServer(planetarium).wsgi_app
On the client, we can subclass APIClient
to add
authentication info to each request:
from cosmic.client import APIClient
class PlanetariumClient(APIClient):
base_url = 'https://api.planetarium.com'
def build_request(self, endpoint, *args, **kwargs):
request = super(APIClient, self).build_request(endpoint, *args, **kwargs)
request.headers["Authorization"] = "secret"
return request
planetarium = PlanetariumClient()
Storing Global Data¶
In every web application some data must be available globally during request
processing, for example, the database connection or the currently
authenticated user. Some frameworks, like
Django, attach this data to the request
object which gets passed around explicitly. Others, like
Flask, store it in a thread-local object. Cosmic
borrows the latter approach, offering you a simple dictionary-like class for
this purpose: ThreadLocalDict
.
from cosmic.globals import ThreadLocalDict
g = ThreadLocalDict()
Now we can use it to store the current user:
class CustomServer(Server):
def view(self, endpoint, request, **url_args):
secret = request.headers.get('Authorization', None)
if secret == '12345':
g['current_user'] = 'bob@example.com'
elif secret == 'qwert':
g['current_user'] = 'alice@example.com'
else:
return error_response("Unauthorized", 401)
return super(CustomServer, self).view(endpoint, request, **url_args)
For testing, it may be necessary to call some functions with a predefined
context, for example, call a function on behalf of Bob. For this, use the
swap()
method:
with g.swap({'current_user': 'dick@example.com'}):
assert g['current_user'] == 'dick@example.com'
The value will be swapped when entering the with
block, and swapped
back when exiting it.