Documentation for Flask app object `get` and `post` class methods? - python

In the Flask documentation on testing (http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/testing/), it has a line of code
rv = self.app.get('/')
And below it, it mentions "By using self.app.get we can send an HTTP GET request to the application with the given path."
Where can the documentation be found for these direct access methods (I'm assuming that there's one for all of the restful methods)? Specifically, I'm wondering what sort of arguments they can take (for example, passing in data, headers, etc). Looking around on flask's documentation for a Flask object, it doesn't seem to list these methods, even though it uses them in the above example.
Alternatively, a knowledgeable individual could answer what I am trying to figure out: I'm trying to simulate sending a POST request to my server, as I would with the following line, if I were doing it over HTTP:
res = requests.post("http://localhost:%d/generate" % port,
data=json.dumps(payload),
headers={"content-type": "application/json"})
The above works when running a Flask app on the proper port. But I tried replacing it with the following:
res = self.app.post("/generate",
data=json.dumps(payload),
headers={"content-type": "application/json"})
And instead, the object I get in response is a 400 BAD REQUEST.

This is documented in the Werkzeug project, from which Flask gets the test client: Werkzeug's test client.
The test client does not issue HTTP requests, it dispatches requests internally, so there is no need to specify a port.
The documentation isn't very clear about support for JSON in the body, but it seems if you pass a string and set the content type you should be fine, so I'm not exactly sure why you get back a code 400. I would check if your /generate view function is invoked at all. A debugger should be useful to figure out where is the 400 coming from.

Related

How do I run a script when an api endpoint is hit?

Here is how I want my program to work. Step 2 is what I am unsure of how to implement.
Client makes API call to /email endpoint
/email endpoint has a script run that gather emails from GMAIL API
Put contents into response object
Returns response object back to client
I understand how to make a static api response. But I can't get a python script to run when the api endpoint is hit.
I saw the flask tag in your post.
I only played around with flask for certain interviews, but know enough to say calling a python script outside your running server is somewhat of an antipattern.
I assume your backend is a flask app, so ideally, you'd want to wrap whatever script you have in your python script file in a function and simply call it from your flask method when the endpoint is hit.
Something like:
from flask import Flask
from custom_emails_module import gather_email
#api.route('/email', methods=["GET"])
def method_associated_with_your_endpoint():
# additional
gather_email()
where custom_emails_module should be the module you create for your gather_emails script.
Now, at the end of your gather_emails function, simple remember to return the correct type, usually done with:
return json.dumps("success": True, "data": python_object_with_several_emails)
Use something like PostMan for local debugging and remember to use application/json in header for Content-Type.
Good luck!

FastAPI: Cannot get error handling to work as expected

I am just learning FastAPI (and loving it), so it is quite likely I am doing something wrong. But here is my problem:
In the code snippet below, I am creating a new user, if there is no user already.
The code works fine, but it is the error handling that I am having trouble with. The errors are properly being pushed forward to FastAPI's internal docs or to an API client like Postman, but not back to the actual client that I am using or the command line.
#app.post("/users/", response_model=schemas.User)
def create_user(user: schemas.UserCreate, db: Session = Depends(get_db)):
db_user = crud.get_user_by_username(db, username=user.username)
if db_user:
raise HTTPException(
status_code=400, detail=f"Username '{user.username}' already registered"
)
return crud.create_user(db=db, user=user)
If I use the auto-generated FastAPI docs (or Postman) and monitor the response in that way, I get the error I am expecting:
But when I look at what I am receiving at the client end (Vue) or what the uvicorn server is logging, it does not contain that information:
As you can see, it just says Bad Request instead of responding with the JSON dict of {"detail": "Username 'miketest' already registered"}
What am I doing wrong? What can I do to make sure that the full HTTPException information is being returned? I am pretty sure the problem is on the FastAPI end, because the client is receiving exactly what the server is outputting as well.
I figured out the problem, and it was not a FastAPI issue, per se, but it was on how it passes information back to the front end.
I thought I should keep this question in case someone has the same issue.
Solution:
try {
await api().post('register',JSON.stringify(data);
} catch (err) {
error = err.response.data.detail;
}
That is to say, the error sent from FastAPI is an object that has a response, and in it a data, and in that a detail.
The response from Postman or anything similar just gives an object with detail. I did not see that there was a middle data layer, and I was having trouble seeing the entire object from within Vue.
This screenshot belongs to console log and it will not contain the API response, the JSON response.
You can see the actual response if you send the request the API using some client, like POSTMAN.

Python http.client - What is the difference between request and putrequest?

The documentation I've found explaining http.client for Python seems a bit sparse. I want to use it over requests because requests has not worked for our project.
So, knowing that I'm using Python's http.client, I'm seeing again and again request and putrequest. Both methods are defined here under HTTPConnection.
HTTPConnection.request: This will send a request to the server using
the HTTP request method method and the selector url.
HTTPConnection.putrequest: This should be the first call after the
connection to the server has been made. It sends a line to the server
consisting of the method string, the url string, and the HTTP version
(HTTP/1.1). To disable automatic sending of Host: or Accept-Encoding:
headers (for example to accept additional content encodings), specify
skip_host or skip_accept_encoding with non-False values.
Also, the source code for both is defined in this file.
From my guess and reading things, it seems like request is a more high level API compared to putrequest. Is that correct?
The Answer: request() is an abstracted version of multiple functions, putrequest() being one of them.
Although this is defined in the documentation, it's easy to skip over the line that answers this question.
This is pointed out in this line of the http.client documentation:
As an alternative to using the request() method described above, you can also send your request step by step, by using the four functions below.

Get HTTP request message from Request object in Scrapy

I need to somehow extract plain HTTP request message from a Request object in Scrapy (so that I could, for example, copy/paste this request and run from Burp).
So given a scrapy.http.Request object, I would like to get the corresponding request message, such as e.g.
POST /test/demo_form.php HTTP/1.1
Host: w3schools.com
name1=value1&name2=value2
Clearly I have all the information I need in the Request object, however trying to reconstruct the message manually is error-prone as I could miss some edge cases. My understanding is that Scrapy first converts this Request into Twisted object, which then writes headers and body into a TCP transport. So maybe there's away to do something similar, but write to a string instead?
UPDATE
I could use the following code to get HTTP 1.0 request message, which is based on http.py. Is there a way to do something similar with HTTP 1.1 requests / http11.py, which is what's actually being sent? I would obviously like to avoid duplicating code from Scrapy/Twisted frameworks as much as possible.
factory = webclient.ScrapyHTTPClientFactory(request)
transport = StringTransport()
protocol = webclient.ScrapyHTTPPageGetter()
protocol.factory = factory protocol.makeConnection(transport)
request_message = transport.value()
print(request_message.decode("utf-8"))
As scrapy is open source and also has plenty of extension points, this should be doable.
The requests are finally assembled and sent out in scrapy/core/downloader/handlers/http11.py in ScrapyAgent.download_request ( https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy/blob/master/scrapy/core/downloader/handlers/http11.py#L270 )
If you place your hook there you can dump the request type, request headers, and request body.
To place your code there you can either try monkey patching ScrapyAgent.download_request or to subclass ScrapyAgent to do the request logging, then subclass HTTP11DownloadHandler to use your Scrapy Agent and then set HTTP11DownloadHandler as new DOWNLOAD_HANDLER for http / https requests in your project's settings.py (for details see: https://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/topics/settings.html#download-handlers)
In my opinion this is the closest you can get to logging the requests going out without using a packet sniffer or a logging proxy (which might be a bit overkill for your scenario).

Can you hook pyramid into twisted, skipping the wsgi part?

Given that :
WSGI doesn't play very well with async.
Twisted ergonomics suck.
Pyramid is very clean and component oriented.
How could I use Pyramid and Twisted ?
I can imagine making a twisted protocol to get the raw HTML request. But then I can't see how to parse it into a pyramid request objects. All documented pyramid tools seems to expect some wsgi interface at some point.
I could use waitress code to parse the request and turn it into a WSGI env then pass the env to pyramid but that's a lot of work with many issues I'm sure I can't even imagine down the road.
I know twisted includes a WSGI server, but it implies synchronicity in the app code, which does not serve my purpose. I want to be able to use the request and response objects, renderers, routers, and others pyramid tools in a twisted asynchronous protocol, with an asynchronous, non blocking app code as well. Hence I won't want to use WSGI.
Twisted API is verbose, heavy and uninuitive compared to any other asynchronous toolkit you'll find in Python or even other languages. Hence the critic about its ergonomics. I can use it, but training newcomers in my team to do it has a high cost. I wish to lower it.
Indeed, it packs a lot of power that I want to use.
To elaborate on my needs, I'm building a tool using crossbar.io and cyclone to have a WAMP/HTTP framework a bit friendlier to my team that the current tools. But cyclone is not as complete as pyramid, and I was hoping pyramid components were decoupled enough that the WSGI paradigm was not enforced, so I could leverage the tremendous work they did on it. All I need is an entry point : somewhere to get the HTML, and parse it into a request objet, and somewhere to take a response object, and returns HTML to the client. I wish i don't have to write a protocol manually for this, http is tricky and I'm sure I'll get it wrong in many ways.
One precision : i don't wish to use the full pyramid framework, just some components here and there, such as rooting, cookie parsing, CSRF protection, etc. I won't use their view system for it assumes a synchronous API.
Looking at Pyramid, I can see that it expects the entire request be be parsed and turned into a request object. it also returns the response as an object as well. So a part of the problem, to hook twisted and pyramid together, is to :
get the http request text as one big chunk from twisted;
parse it into the request object somehow (couldn't find a simple function to do this, but if I can turn it into an WSGI environ + request object, pyramid can convert it to it's format).
get the pyramid response object and turn it into a generator of strings (an adaptor can be find since that's what WSGI does).
Send the response back with twisted from this generator of strings.
Alternatives can be to use something simpler than pyramid like werkzeug for the glue.
Twisted Web lets you interpret HTTP request bodies (regardless of content-type, HTML or otherwise) incrementally as they're received - but it doesn't make doing so very easy. There's a very old ticket that we never seem to make much progress on for improving this situation. Until it's resolved, there probably isn't a better answer than the one I'm about to give. This incremental HTTP request body delivery, I think, is what you're looking for here (because you said you expect requests to "be a big HTML chunk").
The hook for incremental request body handling is Request.handleContentChunk. You can see a complete demonstration of its use in my answer to Python server for streaming request body content.
This gives you the data as it arrives at the server. If you want to use Pyramid, you'll have to construct a Pyramid request that uses this data. Most of the initialization of the Pyramid request object should be straightforward (eg filling the environ dictionary with the request headers - you can take these from Request.requestHeaders). The slightly trickier part will be initializing the Pyramid request object's body - which is supposed to be a file-like object that provides synchronous access to the request body.
On the one hand, if you dispatch the request before the request body has been completely received then you avoid the cost of buffering the entire request body in memory. On the other hand, if you let application code begin to read the request body then you have to deal with the circumstance that it tries to read beyond the point in the data which has actually arrived at the server. This can be dealt with. The body file-like object is expected to present a blocking interface. All you have to do is block until the data is available.
Here's a brief (incomplete, not meant to actually work) sketch of what I mean:
# XXX Note: Queue is not actually thread-safe. Use a safer primitive.
from Queue import Queue
class Body(object):
def __init__(self):
self._buffer = Queue()
self._pending = b""
self._eof = False
def read(self, how_many):
if self._eof:
return b""
if self._pending == b"":
data = self._buffer.get()
if data is None:
self._eof = True
return b""
else:
self._pending = data
if self._pending is None:
result = self._pending[:how_many]
self._pending = self._pending[how_many:]
return result
def _add_data(self, data):
self._buffer.put(data)
You can create an instance of this type, initialize the Pyramid request object's body attribute with it, and then call _add_data on it in the Twisted Request class's handleContentChunk callback.
You could also implement this as an enhancement to Twisted's own WSGI server. For the sake of simplicity, Twisted's WSGI server does read the entire request body before dispatching the request to the WSGI application - but it doesn't have to. If this is the only problem with WSGI then it'd be better to improve the quality of the WSGI implementation and keep the interface rather than both implementing the improvement and stepping outside of the interface (tying you more closely to both Twisted and Pyramid - unnecessarily).
The second half of the problem, generating response bodies incrementally, shouldn't really be a problem. Twisted's WSGI container will write out response data as the WSGI application object yields it. Or if you use twisted.web.resource instead of the WSGI interface, you can call request.write as many times as you like, at any time you like (up until you call request.finish). The only trick is that if you want to do this you must return NOT_DONE_YET from the render method.

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