aiohttp-devtools

Dev tools for aiohttp.

aiohttp-devtools provides a number of tools useful when developing applications with aiohttp and associated libraries.

Installation

pip install aiohttp-devtools

Usage

The aiohttp-devtools CLI (and it's shorter alias adev) consist of two sub-commands: runserver and serve.

runserver

Provides a simple local server for running your application while you're developing.

Usage is simply

adev runserver <app-path>

Note: adev runserver <app-path> will import the whole file, hence it doesn't work with web.run_app(app). You can however use if __name__ == '__main__': web.run_app(app).

app-path can be a path to either a directory containing a recognized default file (app.py or main.py) or to a specific file. The --app-factory option can be used to define which method is called from the app path file, if not supplied some default method names are tried (namely app, app_factory, get_app and create_app, which can be variables, functions, or coroutines).

All runserver arguments can be set via environment variables.

runserver has a few useful features:

livereload will reload resources in the browser as your code changes without having to hit refresh, see livereload for more details.
static files are served separately from your main app (generally on 8001 while your app is on 8000) so you don't have to contaminate your application to serve static files you only need locally.

For more options see adev runserver --help.

serve

Similar to runserver except just serves static files.

Usage is simply

adev serve <path-to-directory-to-serve>

Like runserver you get nice live reloading and access logs. For more options see adev serve --help.

Tutorial

To demonstrate what adev can do when combined with create-aio-app, let's walk through creating a new application:

First let's create a clean python environment to work in and install aiohttp-devtools and create-aio-app.

(it is assumed you've already got python, pip and virtualenv installed)

mkdir my_new_app && cd my_new_app
virtualenv -p `which python3` env
. env/bin/activate
pip install aiohttp-devtools create-aio-app

We're now ready to build our new application with create-aio-app and we'll name the project my_new_app after the current directory.

We're going to explicitly choose no database here to make this tutorial easier, but you can remove that option and choose to use a proper database if you like.

You can just hit return to choose the default for all the options.

create-aio-app my_new_app --without-postgres

That's it, your app is now created. You might want to have a look through the local directory's file tree.

Before you can run your app you'll need to install the other requirements, luckily they've already been listed in requirements/development.txt by create-aio-app, to install simply run

pip install -r requirements/development.txt

You can then run your app with just:

adev runserver

With that:

your app should be being served at localhost:8000 (you can go and play with it in a browser).
Your static files are being served at localhost:8001, adev has configured your app to know that so it should be rendering properly.
any changes to your app's code (.py files) should cause the server to reload, changes to any files (.py as well as .jinja, .js, .css etc.) will cause livereload to prompt your browser to reload the required pages.