Starlite โ Litestar
Starlite has been renamed to Litestar
Litestar is a powerful, performant, flexible and opinionated ASGI framework, offering first class typing support and a full Pydantic integration.
Check out the documentation
Installation
pip install litestarLitestar 2.0 is coming out soon, bringing many new features and improvements. You can check out the alpha version by instead running
pip install litestar==2.0.0alpha7Quick Start
from litestar import Litestar, get
@get("/")
def hello_world() -> dict[str, str]:
"""Keeping the tradition alive with hello world."""
return {"hello": "world"}
app = Litestar(route_handlers=[hello_world])Core Features
- Class based controllers
- Dependency Injection
- Validation and Parsing using Pydantic
- Layered Middleware
- Plugin System
- OpenAPI 3.1 schema generation
- Life Cycle Hooks
- Route Guards based Authorization
- Layered Parameter declaration
- SQLAlchemy Support (via plugin)
- Piccolo ORM Support (via plugin)
- Tortoise ORM Support (via plugin)
- Extended testing support
- Automatic API documentation with:
- Support for dataclasses and
TypedDict - Trio support (built-in, via AnyIO)
- Ultra-fast json serialization and deserialization using msgspec
Example Applications
- starlite-pg-redis-docker: In addition to Litestar, this demonstrates a pattern of application modularity, SQLAlchemy 2.0 ORM, Redis cache connectivity, and more. Like all Litestar projects, this application is open to contributions, big and small.
- litestar-hello-world: A bare-minimum application setup. Great for testing and POC work.
Performance
Litestar is fast. It is on par with, or significantly faster than comparable ASGI frameworks.
You can see and run the benchmarks here, or read more about it here in our documentation.
JSON Benchmarks
Plaintext Benchmarks
Features
Class Based Controllers
While supporting function based route handlers, Litestar also supports and promotes python OOP using class based controllers:
from typing import List, Optional
from pydantic import UUID4
from litestar import Controller, get, post, put, patch, delete
from litestar.partial import Partial
from datetime import datetime
from my_app.models import User
class UserController(Controller):
path = "/users"
@post()
async def create_user(self, data: User) -> User:
...
@get()
async def list_users(self) -> List[User]:
...
@get(path="/{date:int}")
async def list_new_users(self, date: datetime) -> List[User]:
...
@patch(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
async def partial_update_user(self, user_id: UUID4, data: Partial[User]) -> User:
...
@put(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
async def update_user(self, user_id: UUID4, data: User) -> User:
...
@get(path="/{user_name:str}")
async def get_user_by_name(self, user_name: str) -> Optional[User]:
...
@get(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
async def get_user(self, user_id: UUID4) -> User:
...
@delete(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
async def delete_user(self, user_id: UUID4) -> None:
...Data Parsing, Type Hints and Pydantic
Litestar is rigorously typed, and it enforces typing. For example, if you forget to type a return value for a route handler, an exception will be raised. The reason for this is that Litestar uses typing data to generate OpenAPI specs, as well as to validate and parse data. Thus typing is absolutely essential to the framework.
Furthermore, Litestar allows extending its support using plugins.
Plugin System, ORM support and DTOs
Litestar has a plugin system that allows the user to extend serialization/deserialization, OpenAPI generation and other features. It ships with a builtin plugin for SQL Alchemy, which allows the user to use SQLAlchemy declarative classes "natively", i.e. as type parameters that will be serialized/deserialized and to return them as values from route handlers.
Litestar also supports the programmatic creation of DTOs with a DTOFactory class, which also supports the use of
plugins.
OpenAPI
Litestar has custom logic to generate OpenAPI 3.1.0 schema, include optional generation of examples using the
pydantic-factories library.
ReDoc, Swagger-UI and Stoplight Elements API Documentation
Litestar serves the documentation from the generated OpenAPI schema with:
All these are available and enabled by default.
Dependency Injection
Litestar has a simple but powerful DI system inspired by pytest. You can define named dependencies - sync or async - at different levels of the application, and then selective use or overwrite them.
from litestar import Litestar, get
from litestar.di import Provide
async def my_dependency() -> str:
...
@get("/")
async def index(injected: str) -> str:
return injected
app = Litestar([index], dependencies={"injected": Provide(my_dependency)})Middleware
Litestar supports typical ASGI middleware and ships with middlewares to handle things such as
- CORS
- CSRF
- Rate limiting
- GZip and Brotli compression
- Client- and server-side sessions
Route Guards
Litestar has an authorization mechanism called guards, which allows the user to define guard functions at different
level of the application (app, router, controller etc.) and validate the request before hitting the route handler
function.
from litestar import Litestar, get
from litestar.connection import ASGIConnection
from litestar.handlers.base import BaseRouteHandler
from litestar.exceptions import NotAuthorizedException
async def is_authorized(connection: ASGIConnection, handler: BaseRouteHandler) -> None:
# validate authorization
# if not authorized, raise NotAuthorizedException
raise NotAuthorizedException()
@get("/", guards=[is_authorized])
async def index() -> None:
...
app = Litestar([index])Request Life Cycle Hooks
Litestar supports request life cycle hooks, similarly to Flask - i.e. before_request and after_request
Contributing
Litestar is open to contributions big and small. You can always join our discord server or join our Matrix space to discuss contributions and project maintenance. For guidelines on how to contribute, please see the contribution guide.
Contributors โจ
Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):
This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!