M2Core web framework

Status

M2Core is a framework build over Tornado web server. It helps you to build an effective REST API in a few minutes. We use a mix of Tornado, SQLAlchemy and Redis. M2Core has lots of helpers to do you ordinary tasks while building handlers for your REST API. Real benefits are achieved when you are making REST services in connection with PostgreSQL. Redis is used in order to cache access tokens, roles and role permissions, so each authorization check is made without PostgreSQL participation.

The list of main features:

• rights management (completely cached in Redis)

• handy BaseModel mixin

• a bunch of decorators for permissions check, try-catch block and etc.

• automatic documentation in JSON per each method of each handler retrieved from docstrings

• DB schema in JSON with custom fields (we use it somehow in our React form generators)

• helper class for unit testing of REST API

Installation

install package in normal way via pip:

pip install m2core

required packages will install automatically

Usage

M2Core uses tornado.options / tornado.define to set up configuration. Here is a list of settings with default values:

Server options

Option name	Description	Type	Default value
debug	Tornado debug mode	bool	False
config_name	Config name	str	config.py
admin_role_name	Admin group name	str	admins
default_role_name	Default user group with login permissions	str	users
default_permission	Default permission	str	authorized
xsrf_cookie	Enable or disable XSRF-cookie protection	str or bool	False
cookie_secret	Tornado cookie secret	str	gfqeg4t023ty724ythweirhgiuwehrtp
server_port	Tornado TCP server bind port	int	8888
locale	Server locale for dates, times, currency and etc	str	ru_RU.UTF-8
json_indent	Number of space characters, which are used in json responses after new lines	int	2
thread_pool_size	Pool size for background executor	int	10
gen_salt	Argument for gen_salt func in bcrypt module	int	12

DB options

Option name	Description	Type	Default value
debug_orm	SQLAlchemy debug mode	bool	False
pg_host	Database host	str	127.0.0.1
pg_port	Database port	int	5432
pg_port	Database port	int	5432
pg_db	Database name	str	m2core
pg_user	Database user	str	postgres
pg_password	Database password	str	password
pg_pool_size	Pool size for executor	int	40
pg_pool_recycle	Pool recycle time in sec, -1 - disable	int	-1

Redis options

Option name	Description	Type	Default value
redis_host	Redis host	str	127.0.0.1
redis_port	Redis port	int	6379
redis_db	Redis database number (0-15)	int	0

You can place your settings in root folder and name it config.py, or place it wherever you want and pass relative path to this config file via --config_name=my/cool/path/to/config.py argument. You can read more about tornado.options here. By the way, M2Core also supports command-line parsing.

Here is an Example REST API sources. In this example I tried to show most important M2Core features. All modules are documented, you can read description of each function in sources.

Rights management in M2Core is quite simple. You implement your handlers with inheritance from BaseHandler, then do something like:

from handlers import AdminUsersHandler


m2core = M2Core()
human_route = r'/users/:{id:int}'
m2core.add_endpoint(human_route, AdminUsersHandler)
# or like that
m2core.add_endpoint_permissions(human_route, {
    'get': [options.default_permission, 'get_user_info'],
    'post': None,
    'put': [options.default_permission, 'update_user_info'],
    'delete': [options.default_permission, 'delete_user'],
})

This will set certain bunch of permissions per each method of each route you want. You may use the same handler again with different route with other permissions. For further information read docs of m2core.add_endpoint_permissions.

I should say a few words about url mask. It supports it's own rules and later generates url for Tornado. Url masks can be like:

Url mask	Params	Rule description
/users/:{id}	:id	attribute, any type
/users/:{id:int}	:id	int attribute, any length
/users/:{id:int(2)}	:id	int attribute, length is 2 numbers
/users/:{id:float}	:id	float attribute
/users/:{id:float(3)}	:id	float attribute, length is 3 numbers including ,
/users/:{id:float(2,5)}	:id	float attribute, length is between 2 and 5 numbers including ,
/users/:{id:string}	:id	string, any length, without / symbol
/users/:{id:string(2)}	:id	string, length is 2 symbols, without / symbol
/users/:{id:bool}	:id	bool flag, accepts only 0 or 1
/users/:{id:int(0,[0-100])}	:id	int, any length (0), but value must be between 0 and 100
/users/:{id:float(0,[0-100])}	:id	float, any length (0), but value must be between 0 and 100
/users/:{id:string(0,[string1;string2;string3])}	:id	string, any length (0), but value must be in list of values: ('string1', 'string2', 'string3')

Testing

To run all existing tests use command:

TEST_CONFIG=PATH_TO_CONFIG PARSE_CLI_OPTIONS=0 nosetests example.tests

PARSE_CLI_OPTIONS=0 is required, otherwise during integration tests M2Core will try to parse cli args, thinking that it's args of launch script.