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v2.2 LTS

Introduction and Installation

Any developers that are using or have used Masonite

If you can take 5 minutes to complete this survey it would be very much appreciated. Just very simple questions that we can use to make Masonite an even better framework then it already is!

The modern and developer centric Python web framework that strives for an actual batteries included developer tool with a lot of out of the box functionality with an extremely extendable architecture. Masonite is perfect for beginner developers getting into their first web applications as well as experienced devs that need to utilize the full potential of Masonite to get their applications done.

Masonite works hard to be fast and easy from install to deployment so developers can go from concept to creation in as quick and efficiently as possible. Use it for your next SaaS! Try it once and you’ll fall in love.

If you are more of a visual learner you can watch Masonite related tutorial videos at

Some Notable Features Shipped With Masonite

Easily send emails with the Mail Provider and the SMTP and Mailgun drivers.
Send websocket requests from your server with the Broadcast Provider and Pusher and Ably drivers.
IOC container and auto resolving dependency injection.
Service Providers to easily add functionality to the framework.
Extremely simple static files configured and ready to go.
Active Record style ORM called Orator.
An extremely useful command line tool called craft commands.
Extremely extendable.

These, among many other features, are all shipped out of the box and ready to go. Use what you need when you need it.

Requirements

In order to use Masonite, you’ll need:

Python 3.4+
Latest version of OpenSSL
Pip3

All commands of python and pip in this documentation is assuming they are pointing to the corresponding Python 3 versions. If you are having issues with any installation steps just be sure the commands are for Python 3.4+ and not 2.7 or below.

Linux

If you are running on a Linux flavor, you’ll need the Python dev package and the libssl package. You can download these packages by running:

Debian and Ubuntu based Linux distributions

Or you may need to specify your python3.x-dev version:

Enterprise Linux based distributions (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, ...)

Installation

Masonite excels at being simple to install and get going. We use a simple command line tool that will become your best friend. You’ll never want to develop again without it. We call them craft commands.

We can download our craft command line tool by just running:

If you already have craft installed, Masonite 2.2 requires masonite-cli>=2.2.0 so you may have to run with the upgrade flag too.

Creating Our Project

Great! We are now ready to create our first project. We should have the new craft command. We can check this by running:

This should show a list of command options. If it doesn't then you may have installed the masonite cli incorrectly. Try uninstalling it and be sure when you install it you install it with a --user flag like pip install masonite-cli --user.

We are currently only interested in the craft new command. To create a new project just run:

This will get the latest Masonite project template and unzip it for you. We just need to go into our new project directory and install the dependencies in our requirements.txt file.

Activating Our Virtual Environment (optional)

You can optionally create a virtual environment if you don't want to install all of masonite's dependencies on your systems Python. If you use virtual environments then create your virtual environment by running:

or if you are on Windows:

The pythoncommand here is utilizing Python 3. Your machine may run Python 2 (typically 2.7) by default for UNIX machines. You may set an alias on your machine for Python 3 or simply run python3anytime you see the pythoncommand.

For example, you would run python3 -m venv venv instead of python -m venv venv

Installing Our Dependencies

Now lets install our dependencies. We can do this simply by using a craft command:

This command is just a wrapper around the pipcommand. This installs all the required dependencies of Masonite, creates a .env file for us, generates a new secret key, and puts that secret key in our .env file. After it’s done we can just run the server by using another craft command:

Running The Server

After it’s done we can just run the server by using another craft command:

Congratulations! You’ve setup your first Masonite project! Keep going to learn more about how to use Masonite to build your applications.

The Masonite CLI (also known as craft) will try to find all the commands in your project but may not be able to. In this case you will need to call craft directly using something like:

Masonite has romantic versioning instead of semantic versioning. Because of this, all minor releases (2.0.x) will contain bug fixes and fully backwards compatible feature releases. Be sure to always keep your application up to date with the latest minor release to get the full benefit of Masonite's romantic versioning.

Creating a Blog

Preface

This section of the documentation will contain various tutorials. These are guides that are designed to take you from beginning to end on building various types of projects with Masonite. We may not explain things in much detail for each section as this part of the documentation is designed to just get you familiar with the inner workings of Masonite.

Since this section of the documentation is designed to just get you up and coding with Masonite, any further explanations that should be presented are inside various "hint blocks." Once you are done with the tutorial or simply want to learn more about a topic it is advised that you go through each hint block and follow the links to dive deeper into the reference documentation which does significantly more explaining.

Hint Blocks

You will see various hint blocks throughout the tutorials. Below are examples of what the various colors represent.

You'll see hint blocks that are green which you should follow if you want to learn more information about the topic currently being discussed.

You'll also see hint blocks that are blue. These should not be ignored and typically contain background information you need to further understand something.

Installation

This tutorial will assume you have already installed Masonite. If you haven't, be sure to read the Installation guide to get a fresh install of Masonite up and running. Once you have one up and running or if you already have it running, go ahead and continue on.

Creating a Blog

In this tutorial we will walk through how to create a blog. We will touch on all the major systems of Masonite and it should give you the confidence to try the more advanced tutorials or build an application yourself.

Routing

Typically your first starting point for your Masonite development flow will be to create a route. All routes are located in routes/web.py and are extremely simple to understand. They consist of a request method and a route method. Routing is simply stating what incoming URI's should direct to which controllers.

For example, to create a GET request route it will look like:

from masonite.routes import Get

Get('/url', 'Controller@method')

We'll talk more about the controller in a little bit.

You can read more about routes in the Routing documentation

Creating our Route:

We will start off by creating a view and controller to create a blog post.

A controller is a simple class that holds controller methods. These controller methods will be what our routes will call so they will contain all of our application's business logic.

Think of a controller method as a function in the views.py file if you are coming from the Django framework

Let's create our first route now. We can put all routes inside routes/web.py and inside the ROUTES list. You'll see we have a route for the home page. Let's add a route for creating blogs.

ROUTES = [
    Get('/', 'WelcomeController@show').name('welcome'),

    # Blog Routes
    Get('/blog', 'BlogController@show')
]

You'll notice here we have a BlogController@show string. This means "use the blog controller's show method to render this route". The only problem here is that we don't yet have a blog controller.

Let's create the BlogController in the next step: Part 2 - Creating Our First Controller

Creating a Controller

All controllers are located in the app/http/controllers directory and Masonite promotes 1 controller per file. This has proven efficient for larger application development because most developers use text editors with advanced search features such as Sublime, VSCode or Atom. Switching between classes in this instance is simple and promotes faster development. It's easy to remember where the controller exactly is because the name of the file is the controller.

You can of course move controllers around wherever you like them but the craft command line tool will default to putting them in separate files. If this seems weird to you it might be worth a try to see if you like this opinionated layout.

Creating Our First Controller

Like most parts of Masonite, you can scaffold a controller with a craft command:

$ craft controller Blog

This will create a controller in app/http/controllers directory that looks like this:

"""A BlogController Module."""

from masonite.request import Request
from masonite.view import View
from masonite.controllers import Controller


class BlogController(Controller):
    """BlogController Controller Class."""

    def __init__(self, request: Request):
        """BlogController Initializer

        Arguments:
            request {masonite.request.Request} -- The Masonite Request class.
        """
        self.request = request

    def show(self, view: View):
        pass

Simple enough, right? You'll notice we have a show method we were looking for. These are called "controller methods" and are similiar to what Django calls a "view."

But also notice we now have our show method that we specified in our route earlier.

Returning a View

We can return a lot of different things in our controller but for now we can return a view from our controller. A view in Masonite are html files or "templates". They are not Python objects themselves like other Python frameworks. Views are what the users will see (or view).

This is important as this is our first introduction to Python's IOC container. We specify in our parameter list that we need a view class and Masonite will inject it for us.

For now on we won't focus on the whole controller but just the sections we are worried about. A ... means there is stuff in between code that we are not worried about:

from masonite.view import View 
...
def show(self, view: View):
    return view.render('blog')

Notice here we annotated the View class. This is what Masonite calls "Auto resolving dependency injection". If this doesn't make sense to you right now don't worry. The more you read on the more you will understand.

Be sure to learn more about the Service Container.

Creating Our View

You'll notice now that we are returning the blog view but it does not exist yet.

All views are in the resources/templates directory. We can create a new file called resources/templates/blog.html or we can use another craft command:

$ craft view blog

This will create that template we wanted above for us.

We can put some text in this file like:

This is a blog

and then run the server

$ craft serve

and open up http://localhost:8000/blog. You will see "This is a blog" in your web browser.

Authentication

Most applications will require some form of authentication. Masonite comes with a craft command to scaffold out an authentication system for you. This should typically be ran on fresh installations of Masonite since it will create controllers routes and views for you.

For our blog, we will need to setup some form of registration so we can get new users to start posting to our blog. We can create an authentication system by running the craft command:

$ craft auth

We should get a success message saying that some new assets were created. You can check your controllers folder and you should see a few new controllers there that should handle registrations.

We will check what was created for us in a bit.

Database Setup

In order to register these users, we will need a database. Hopefully you already have some kind of local database setup like MySQL or Postgres but we will assume that you do not. In this case we can just use SQLite.

Now we just need to change a few environment variables so Masonite can create the SQLite database.

These environment variable can be found in the .env file in the root of the project. Open that file up and you should see a few lines that look like:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=masonite
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=root

Go ahead and change those setting to your connection settings by adding sqlite to the DB_CONNECTION variable and whatever you want for your database which will be created for you when you migrate. We will call it blog.db:

DB_CONNECTION=sqlite
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=blog.db
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=root

Migrating

Once you have set the correct credentials, we can go ahead and migrate the database. Out of the box, Masonite has a migration for a users table which will be the foundation of our user. You can edit this user migration before migrating but the default configuration will suit most needs just fine and you can always add or remove columns at a later date.

$ craft migrate

This will create our users table for us along with a migrations table to keep track of any migrations we add later.

Creating Users

Now that we have the authentication and the migrations all migrated in, let's create our first user. Remember that we ran craft auth so we have a few new templates and controllers.

Go ahead and run the server:

$ craft serve

and head over to http://localhost:8000/register and fill out the form. You can use whatever name and email you like but for this purpose we will use:

Username: demo
Email: demo@email.com
Password: password

Migrations

Now that we have our authentication setup and we are comfortable with migrating our migrations, let's create a new migration where we will store our posts.

Our posts table should have a few obvious columns that we will simplify for this tutorial part. Let's walk through how we create migrations with Masonite.

Craft Command

Not surprisingly, we have a craft command to create migrations. You can read more about Database Migrations here but we'll simplify it down to the command and explain a little bit of what's going on:

$ craft migration create_posts_table --create posts

This command simply creates the start of a migration that will create the posts table. By convention, table names should be plural (and model names should be singular but more on this later).

This will create a migration in the databases/migrations folder. Let's open that up and starting on line 6 we should see something that looks like:

def up(self):
    """
    Run the migrations.
    """
    with self.schema.create('posts') as table:
        table.increments('id')
        table.timestamps()

Lets add a title, an author, and a body to our posts tables.

def up(self):
    """
    Run the migrations.
    """
    with self.schema.create('posts') as table:
        table.increments('id')
        table.string('title')

        table.integer('author_id').unsigned()
        table.foreign('author_id').references('id').on('users')

        table.string('body')
        table.timestamps()

This should be fairly straight forward but if you want to learn more, be sure to read the Database Migrations documentation.

Now we can migrate this migration to create the posts table

$ craft migrate

Models

Now that we have our tables and migrations all done and we have a posts table, let's create a model for it.

Models in Masonite are a bit different than other Python frameworks. Masonite uses Orator which is an Active Record implementation of an ORM. This bascially means we will not be building our model and then translating that into a migration. Models and migrations are separate in Masonite. Our models will take shape of our tables regardless of what the table looks like.

Creating our Model

Again, we can use a craft command to create our model:

$ craft model Post

Notice we used the singular form for our model. By default, Orator will check for the plural name of the class in our database (in this case posts) by simply appending an "s" onto the model. We will talk about how to specify the table explicitly in a bit.

The model created now resides inside app/Post.py and when we open it up it should look like:

"""A Post Database Model."""
from config.database import Model

class Post(Model):
    pass

Simple enough, right? Like previously stated, we don't have to manipulate the model. The model will take shape of the table as we create or change migrations.

Table Name

Again, the table name that the model is attached to is the plural version of the model (by appending an "s") but if you called your table something different such as "blog" instead of "blogs" we can specify the table name explicitly:

"""A Post Database Model."""
from config.database import Model

class Post(Model):
    __table__ = 'blog'

Mass Assignment

Orator by default protects against mass assignment as a security measure so we will explicitly need to set what columns we would like to be fillable:

"""A Post Database Model."""
from config.database import Model

class Post(Model):
    __fillable__ = ['title', 'author_id', 'body']

Relationships

The relationship is pretty straight forward here. Remember that we created a foreign key in our migration. We can create that relationship in our model like so:

"""A Post Database Model."""
from config.database import Model
from orator.orm import belongs_to

class Post(Model):
    __fillable__ = ['title', 'author_id', 'body']

    @belongs_to('author_id', 'id')
    def author(self):
        from app.User import User
        return User

Because of how Masonite does models, some models may rely on each other so it is typically better to perform the import inside the relationship like we did above to prevent any possibilities of circular imports.

We won't go into much more detail here about different types of relationships but to learn more, read the ORM documentation.

Designing Our Blog

Let's setup a little HTML so we can learn a bit more about how views work. In this part we will setup a really basic template in order to not clog up this part with too much HTML but we will learn the basics enough that you can move forward and create a really awesome blog template (or collect one from the internet).

Now that we have all the models and migrations setup, we have everything in the backend that we need to create a layout and start creating and updating blog posts.

We will also check if the user is logged in before creating a template.

The Template For Creating

The URL for creating will be located at /blog/create and will be a simple form for creating a blog post

<form action="/blog/create" method="POST">
    {{ csrf_field }}

    <input type="name" name="title">
    <textarea name="body"></textarea>
</form>

Notice here we have this strange {{ csrf_field }} looking text. Masonite comes with CSRF protection so we need a token to render with the CSRF field.

Now because we have a foreign key in our posts table, we need to make sure the user is logged in before creating this so let's change up our template a bit:

{% if auth() %}
    <form action="/blog/create" method="POST">
        {{ csrf_field }}

        <label> Title </label>
        <input type="name" name="title"><br>

        <label> Body </label>
        <textarea name="body"></textarea>

        <input type="submit" value="Post!">
    </form>
{% else %}
    <a href="/login">Please Login</a>
{% endif %}

auth() is a view helper function that either returns the current user or returns None.

Masonite uses Jinja2 templating so if you don't understand this templating, be sure to read their documentation.

Static Files

For simplicity sake, we won't be styling our blog with something like Bootstrap but it is important to learn how static files such as CSS files work with Masonite so let's walk through how to add a CSS file and add it to our blog.

Firstly, head to storage/static/ and make a blog.css file and throw anything you like in it. For this tutorial we will make the html page slightly grey.

html {
    background-color: #ddd;
}

Now we can add it to our template like so right at the top:

<link href="/static/blog.css" rel="stylesheet">
{% if auth() %}
    <form action="/blog/create" method="POST">
        {{ csrf_field }}

        <label> Title </label>
        <input type="name" name="title"><br>

        <label> Body </label>
        <textarea name="body"></textarea>

        <input type="submit" value="Post!">
    </form>
{% else %}
    <a href="/login">Please Login</a>
{% endif %}

That's it. Static files are really simple. It's important to know how they work but for this tutorial we will ignore them for now and focus on more of the backend.

Javascript files are the same exact thing:

<link href="/static/blog.css" rel="stylesheet">
{% if auth() %}
    <form action="/blog/create" method="POST">
        {{ csrf_field }}

        <label> Title </label>
        <input type="name" name="title"><br>

        <label> Body </label>
        <textarea name="body"></textarea>

        <input type="submit" value="Post!">
    </form>
{% else %}
    <a href="/login">Please Login</a>
{% endif %}

<script src="/static/script.js"></script>

For more information on static files, checkout the Static Files documentaton.

The Controller For Creating And The Container

Notice that our action is going to /blog/create so we need to direct a route to our controller method. In this case we will direct it to a store method.

Let's open back up routes/web.py and create a new route. Just add this to the ROUTES list:

from masonite.routes import Get, Post
...

Post('/blog/create', 'BlogController@store'),

and create a new store method on our controller:

...
def show(self, view: View): 
    return view.render('blog')

# New store Method
def store(self): 
    pass

Now notice above in the form we are going to be receiving 2 form inputs: title and body. So let's import the Post model and create a new post with the input.

from app.Post import Post
from masonite.request import Request
...

def store(self, request: Request):
    Post.create(
        title=request.input('title'),
        body=request.input('body'),
        author_id=request.user().id
    )

    return 'post created'

Notice that we now used request: Request here. This is the Request object. Where did this come from? This is the power and beauty of Masonite and your first introduction to the Service Container. The Service Container is an extremely powerful implementation as allows you to ask Masonite for an object (in this case Request) and get that object. This is an important concept to grasp so be sure to read the documentation further.

Read more about the Service Container here.

Also notice we used an input() method. Masonite does not discriminate against different request methods so getting input on a GET or a POST request doesn't matter. You will always use this input method.

Go ahead and run the server using craft serve and head over to http://localhost:8000/blog and create a post. This should hit the /blog/create route with the POST request method and we should see "post created".

Showing Our Posts

Lets go ahead and show how we can show the posts we just created. In this part we will create 2 new templates to show all posts and a specific post.

Creating The Templates

Let's create 2 new templates.

$ craft view posts
$ craft view single

Let's start with showing all posts

Creating The Controller

Let's create a controller for the posts to separate it out from the BlogController.

$ craft controller Post

Great! So now in our show method we will show all posts and then we will create a single method to show a specific post.

Show Method

Let's get the show method to return the posts view with all the posts:

from app.Post import Post

...

def show(self, view: View):
    posts = Post.all()

    return view.render('posts', {'posts': posts})

Posts Route

We need to add a route for this method:

Get('/posts', 'PostController@show')

Posts View

Our posts view can be very simple:

{% for post in posts %}
    {{ post.title }}
    <br>
    {{ post.body }}
    <hr>
{% endfor %}

Go ahead and run the server and head over to http://localhost:8000/posts route. You should see a basic representation of your posts. If you only see 1, go to http://localhost:8000/blog to create more so we can show an individual post.

Showing The Author

Remember we made our author relationship before. Orator will take that relationship and make an attribute from it so we can display the author's name as well:

{% for post in posts %}
    {{ post.title }} by {{ post.author.name }}
    <br>
    {{ post.body }}
    <hr>
{% endfor %}

Let's repeat the process but change our workflow a bit.

Single Post Route

Next we want to just show a single post. We need to add a route for this method:

Get('/post/@id', 'PostController@single')

Notice here we have a @id string. We can use this to grab that section of the URL in our controller in the next section below.

Single Method

Let's create a single method so we show a single post.

from app.Post import Post
from masonite.request import Request
from masonite.view import View
...

def single(self, view: View, request: Request):
    post = Post.find(request.param('id'))

    return view.render('single', {'post': post})

We use the param() method to fetch the id from the URL. Remember this key was set in the route above when we specified the @id

For a real application we might do something like @slug and then fetch it with request().param('slug').

Single Post View

We just need to display 1 post so lets just put together a simple view:

{{ post.title }}
<br>
{{ post.body }}
<hr>

Go ahead and run the server and head over the http://localhost:8000/post/1 route and then http://localhost:8000/post/2 and see how the posts are different.

Updating and Deleting Posts

By now, all of the logic we have gone over so far will take you a long way so let's just finish up quickly with updating and deleting a posts. We'll assume you are comfortable with what we have learned so far so we will run through this faster since this is just more of what were in the previous parts.

Update Controller Method

Let's just make an update method on the PostController:

def update(self, view: View, request: Request):
    post = Post.find(request.param('id'))

    return view.render('update', {'post': post})

def store(self, request: Request):
    post = Post.find(request.param('id'))

    post.title = request.input('title')
    post.body = request.input('body')

    post.save()

    return 'post updated'

Since we are more comfortable with controllers we can go ahead and make two at once. We made one that shows a view that shows a form to update a post and then one that actually updates the post with the database.

Create The View

$ craft view update

<form action="/post/{{ post.id }}/update" method="POST">
    {{ csrf_field }}

    <label for="">Title</label>
    <input type="text" name="title" value="{{ post.title }}"><br>

    <label>Body</label>
    <textarea name="body">{{ post.body }}</textarea><br>

    <input type="submit" value="Update">
</form>

Create The Routes:

Remember we made 2 controller methods so let's attach them to a route here:

Get('/post/@id/update', 'PostController@update'),
Post('/post/@id/update', 'PostController@store'),

That should be it! We can now update our posts.

Delete Method

Let's expand a bit and made a delete method.

from masonite.request import Request
...

def delete(self, request: Request):
    post = Post.find(request.param('id'))

    post.delete()

    return 'post deleted'

Make the route:

Get('/post/@id/delete', 'PostController@delete'),

Notice we used a GET route here, It would be much better to use a POST method but for simplicity sake will assume you can create one by now. We will just add a link to our update method which will delete the post.

Update the Template

We can throw a delete link right inside our update template:

<form action="/post/{{ post.id }}/update" method="POST">
    {{ csrf_field }}

    <label for="">Title</label>
    <input type="text" name="title" value="{{ post.title }}"><br>

    <label>Body</label>
    <textarea name="body">{{ post.body }}</textarea><br>

    <input type="submit" value="Update">

    <a href="/post/{{ post.id }}/delete"> Delete </a>
</form>

Great! You now have a blog that you can use to create, view, update and delete posts! Go on to create amazing things!

Prologue

Contributing Guide

Introduction

When contributing to this repository, please first discuss the change you wish to make via an issue or in the Masonite Slack channel.

Please note we have a code of conduct, please follow it in all your interactions with the project. You can find it in the base of the core project directory.

Getting Started

The framework has three main parts.

This MasoniteFramework/masonite repository is the main repository that will install when creating new projects using the craft new command. This is actually a full Masonite project. Not much development will be done in this repository and won't be changed unless new releases of Masonite require changes in the default installation project.

The MasoniteFramework/core repository is where the main masonite pip package lives. This is where the from masonite ... module lives.

The MasoniteFramework/craft repository where the craft command lives. This is the actual command itself and is installed when you run pip install masonite-cli --user.

Getting the Masonite repository up and running to be edited

You can read about how the framework flows, works and architectural concepts here

This repo is simple and will be able to be installed following the installation instruction in the README.

Fork the MasoniteFramework/masonite repo.
Clone that repo into your computer:
- git clone http://github.com/your-username/masonite.git
Checkout the current release branch (example: develop)
- git checkout -b develop
You should now be on a develop local branch.
Run git pull origin develop to get the current release version.
From there simply create your feature branches (<feature|fix>-<issue-number>) and make your desired changes.
Push to your origin repository:
- git push origin change-default-orm
Open a pull request and follow the PR process below

Editing the Masonite core repository

The trick to this is that we need it to be pip installed and then quickly editable until we like it, and then pushed back to the repo for a PR. Do this only if you want to make changes to the core Masonite package

To do this just:

Fork the MasoniteFramework/core repo,
Clone that repo into your computer:
- git clone http://github.com/your-username/core.git
Activate your masonite virtual environment (optional)
- Go to where you installed masonite and activate the environment
While inside the virtual environment, cd into the directory you installed core.
Run pip install . from inside the masonite-core directory. This will install masonite as a pip package.
Any changes you make to this package just push it to your feature branch on your fork and follow the PR process below.

This repository has a barebones skeleton of a sample project in order to aid in testing all the features of Masonite against a real project. If you install this as editable by passing the --editable flag then this may break your project because it will override the modules in this package with your application modules.

Editing the craft repository (`craft` commands)

Craft commands make up a large part of the workflow for Masonite. Follow these instructions to get the masonite-cli package on your computer and editable.

Fork the MasoniteFramework/craft repo,
Clone that repo into your computer:
- git clone http://github.com/your-username/craft.git
Activate your masonite virtual environment (optional)
- Go to where you installed masonite and activate the environment
While inside the virtual environment, cd into the directory you installed cli
Run pip install --editable . from inside the masonite-cli directory. This will install craft (which contains the craft commands) as a pip package but also keep a reference to the folder so you can make changes freely to craft commands while not having to worry about continuously reinstalling it.
Any changes you make to this package just push it to your feature branch on your fork and follow the PR process below.

Comments

Comments are a vital part of any repository and should be used where needed. It is important not to overcomment something. If you find you need to constantly add comments, you're code may be too complex. Code should be self documenting (with clearly defined variable and method names)

Types of comments to use

There are 3 main type of comments you should use when developing for Masonite:

Module Docstrings

All modules should have a docstring at the top of every module file and should look something like:

"""This is a module to add support for Billing users."""
from masonite.request import Request
...

Notice there are no spaces before and after the sentence.

Method and Function Docstrings

All methods and functions should also contain a docstring with a brief description of what the module does

For example:

def some_function(self):
    """This is a function that does x action. 

    Then give an exmaple of when to use it 
    """
    ... code ...

Methods and Functions with Dependencies

Most methods will require some dependency or parameters. You must specify them like this:

def route(self, route, output):
    """Load the route into the class. This also looks for the controller and attaches it to the route.

    Arguments:
        route {string} -- This is a URI to attach to the route (/dashboard/user).
        output {string|object} -- Controller to attach to the route.

    Returns:
        self
    """

And if your dependency are object it should give the path to the module:

def __init__(self, request: Request, csrf: Csrf, view: View):
    """Initialize the CSRF Middleware

    Arguments:
        request {masonite.request.Request} -- The normal Masonite request class.
        csrf {masonite.auth.Csrf} -- CSRF auth class.
        view {masonite.view.View} -- The normal Masonite view class.
    """
    pass

Code Comments

If you're code MUST be complex enough that future developers will not understand it, add a # comment above it

For normal code this will look something like:

# This code performs a complex task that may not be understood later on
# You can add a second line like this
complex_code = 'value'

perform_some_complex_task()

Pull Request Process

You should open an issue before making any pull requests. Not all features will be added to the framework and some may be better off as a third party package or not be done at all. It wouldn't be good if you worked on a feature for several days and the pull request gets rejected for reasons that could have been discussed in an issue for several minutes.
Ensure any changes are well commented and any configuration files that are added have a docstring comments on the variables it's setting.
Update the README.md and MasoniteFramework/docs repo with details of changes to the interface, this includes new environment variables, new file locations, container parameters etc.
Name your branches in the form of feature|fix-<issue-number>. For example if you are doing a bug fix and the issue number is 576 then name your branch fix-576. This will help us locate the branches on our systems at later dates. If it is a new feature name it feature-576.
You must add unit testing for any changes made. Of the three repositories listed above, only the craft and core repos require unit testing.
Increase the version numbers in any example files and the README.md to the new version that this Pull Request would represent. The versioning scheme we use is RomVer.
The PR must pass the Travis CI build. The Pull Request can be merged in once you have a successful review from two other collaborators, or one review from a maintainer or Masonite creator.

Code of Conduct

Our Pledge

In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.

Our Standards

Examples of behavior that contributes to creating a positive environment include:

Using welcoming and inclusive language
Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences
Gracefully accepting constructive criticism
Focusing on what is best for the community
Showing empathy towards other community members

Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include:

The use of sexualized language or imagery and unwelcome sexual attention or advances
Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks
Public or private harassment
Publishing others' private information, such as a physical or electronic
address, without explicit permission
Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a
professional setting

Our Responsibilities

Project maintainers are responsible for clarifying the standards of acceptable behavior and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in response to any instances of unacceptable behavior.

Project maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or permanently any contributor for other behaviors that they deem inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful.

Scope

This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community. Examples of representing a project or community include using an official project e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event. Representation of a project may be further defined and clarified by project maintainers.

Enforcement

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by contacting the project team at idmann509@gmail.com. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. The project team is obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident. Further details of specific enforcement policies may be posted separately.

Project maintainers who do not follow or enforce the Code of Conduct in good faith may face temporary or permanent repercussions as determined by other members of the project's leadership.

Attribution

This Code of Conduct is adapted from the Contributor Covenant, version 1.4, available at http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4

How To Contribute

Introduction

There are plenty of ways to contribute to open source. Many of which don't even rely on writing code. A great open source project should have excellent documentation, a thriving community and have as little bugs as possible. Below I will explain how to contribute to this project in different ways both including and exluding code contributions.

This is not an exhaustive list and not the only ways to contribute but they are the most common. If you know of other ways to contribute then please let us know.

Contributing to Development

Of course the project requires contributions to the main development aspects but it's not the only way. But if you would like to contribute to development then a great way to get started is to simply read through this documentation. Get acquainted with how the framework works, how Controllers and Routing work and read the Architectural Concepts documentation starting with the Request Lifecycle, then the Service Providers and finally the Service Container.

It would also be good to read about the Release Cycle to get familiar with how Masonite does releases (SemVer and RomVer).

Become a Feature Maintainer

Feature Maintainers are people who are in charge of specific features (such as Caching or Creating Packages). These developers will be in charge of reviewing PR's and merging them into the development branch and also have direct contact with the repository owner to discuss.

Feature maintainers must already have significant contributions to development of the repository they are trying to be a Feature Maintainer for. Although they do not have to be contributors to the actual feature they plan to maintain.

Comment the Code

If you don't want to touch the code and instead want to just look at it and figure it out, contribute some comments! Comments are an excellent way for future developers to read and understand the framework. Masonite strives on being extremely commented. Although most of the code itself does not need to be commented, some of the classes, modules, methods and functions do (although a lot of them already are).

Comments don't affect the working code so if you want to get used to contributing to open source or you just don't quite understand what a class method is doing or you are afraid of contributing and breaking the project (there are tests) then contributing comments is right for you!

Write Tests

The Masonite pip packages require testing (The main repository does not). If you want to search through all the tests in the tests directories of those repositories and write additional tests and use cases then that will be great! There are already over 100 tests but you can always write more. With more testing comes more stability. Especially as people start to contribute to the project. Check the tests that are already there and write any use cases that are missing. These tests can be things such as special characters in a url or other oddities that may not have been thought of when using TDD for that feature.

Contribute to Tutorials

Once familiar with the project (by either contributing or by building application using the framework) it would be excellent if you could write or record tutorials and put them on Medium or YouTube. In order for the framework to be successful, it needs to have a plethora of documentation even outside of this documentation. It needs to have notoriety and if people are seeing the framework pop up in their favorite locations they will be more inclined to use the framework and contribute to it as well.

Plus there will be fantastic tutorials out there for beginners to find and watch and you could also build a following off the back of Masonite.

Fix the Documentation

This documentation is fantastic but there are spots where it could be improved. Maybe we haven't explained something fully or something just doesn't make sense to you. Masonite uses Gitbook.com to host it's documentation and with that you are able to comment directly on the documentation which will start a discussion between you and the documentation collaborators. So if you want to cycle through the documentation page by page and get acquainted with the framework but at the same time contribute to the documentation, this is perfect for you.

Report Bugs

If you just don't want to contribute code to the main project you may instead simply report bugs or improvements. You can go ahead and build any of your applications as usual and report any bugs you encounter to the GitHub.com issues page.

Squash Bugs

Look at the issues page on GitHub.com for any issues, bugs or enhancements that you are willing to fix. If you don't know how to work on them, just comment on the issue and Joseph Mancuso or other core contributors will be more than happy explaining step by step on how you can go about fixing or developing that issue.

Build a Community

If you have a large following on any social media or no following at all, you can contribute by trying to build up a following around Masonite. Any open source project requires an amazing community around the framework. You can either build up a community personally and be the leader of that community or you can simply send them to Masonite's GitHub repository where we can build up a community around there.

Build Community Software Around Masonite

Another idea is to use Masonite to build applications such as a screencast website like LaraCasts.com or an official Masonite website or even a social network around Masonite. Every great framework needs it's "ecosystem" so you may be apart of that by building these applications with the Masonite branding and logos. Although copying the branding requires an OK from Joseph Mancuso, as long as the website was built with Masonite and looks clean it shouldn't be a problem at all.

Answer Questions from the Community

Questions will come in eventually either through the GitHub issues or through websites like StackOverflow. You could make it a priority to be the first to answer these peoples questions or if you don't know the answer you can redirect one of the core maintainers or contributors to the question so we can answer it further.

Review Code on Pull Requests

Most pull requests will sit inside GitHub for a few days while it gets quality tested. The main develop branch pull requests could sit there for as long as 6 months and will only be merged in on releases. With that being said, you can look at the file changes of these pull requests and ensure they meet the community guidelines, the API is similar to other aspects of the project and that they are being respectful and following pull requests rules in accordance with the Contributing Guide documentation.

Discuss Issues

Every now and then will be a requires discussion label on an issue or pull request. If you see this label then be sure to add your thoughts on an issue. All issues are open for discussion and Masonite strives off of developer input so feel free to enter a discussion.

Create Packages

Every framework needs great packages and we as the maintainers of Masonite can only do so much with coming out with great packages and maintaining the framework at the same time. We look forward to our community coming out with awesome additions to the Masonite ecosystem. If you have any issues then be sure to open in the gitter chatroom on the Github homepage.

Release Cycle

Introduction

The Masonite framework itself follows the RomVer versioning schema which is PARADIGM.MAJOR.MINOR although all Masonite packages follow the SemVer versioning schema which is MAJOR.MINOR.BUGFIX.

This means that a framework version of 1.3.20 may have breaking changes with version 1.4.0. Masonite uses a 6 month major release cycle in order to maintain it's state as a modern Python web framework. Each release is a solid and stable release and upgrading typically takes minimal time.

Reasoning for RomVer over SemVer

The Masonite main repository (the MiraFramework/masonite repository) contains only the basic file structure of the application. All of the core framework functionality is inside the MasoniteFramework/core repository which can be updated as much as every day or once per month.

Because MiraFramework/masonite does not require major updates, we can follow RomVer nicely and keep the versioning number artificially lower. Any major updates to this repsository will likely just be file structure changes which should rarely happen unless there are major architectural changes.

Releases and Release Cycles

Masonite is currently on a 6 month major release cycle. This means that once six months will be a new 2.x release.

Releases are planned to be upgradable from the previous release in 30 minutes or less. If they break that requirement then they should be considered for the next Paradigm release (the x.0.0 release)

Scheduled Releases

Creating Releases

Masonite is made up of three different repositories. There is

The main repository where development is done on the repo that installs on developer's systems.
The core repository which is where the main Masonite pip package is located.
The craft repository where the craft command tool is located.

Major 6 month releases will be released on or after the release date when all repositories are able to be released at the same time, as well as passing all tests.

The core repository is uploaded to PyPi under the new release. At this time, everyone could theoretically install the package. Once core is released, craft is updated for any minor changes it may require. Once these two repositories are completed, the masonite repository is updated and finally released. Once this repo is released to the latest version, all future projects will default to the latest version of Masonite.

After that we will bump the version of Masonite in the documentation and verify and update any documentation that is not up to standard.

Whenever the MasoniteFramework/craft and MasoniteFramework/core repositories are released on Github, Travis CI will run tests and automatically deploy to PyPi. These major version numbers should correspond to the version of Masonite they support. For example, if the MasoniteFramework/masonite releases to version 1.4, MasoniteFramework/core should bump up to 1.4.x regardless of changes.

Main Repository and New Projects

This is so developers and maintainers will be able to test the new pre release with their applications. Once all QA tests have passed, it will be marked as a normal release and therefore all new applications created from there on out will be the new release.

Developers will still have the option of doing something like: craft new project_name --version 1.6 and installing that version of Masonite.

Once all three repositories are ready for release, they will all be released on GitHub under the respective new version numbers.

Known Installation Issues

Introduction

There are no known Masonite specific issues known and if there are then there should be an issue open for them on GitHub. With that being said, some users may experience some difficulties with installing Masonite simply because their computer environment is not the norm, they have never setup Python and may have configured it incorrectly or they have not used Python in a while and have an old version.

Before you get started reading through this FAQ make sure you have:

Python 3.4+
Pip3

Ensure you are installing masonite-cli with pip3 and not pip.

I ran pip install masonite-cli but it gave me a permission error?

You are likely running this command on a UNIX based machine like Mac or Linux. In that case you should either run it again with a sudo command or a user command flag:

$ pip install masonite-cli --user

$ pip install --user masonite-cli

I pip installed masonite-cli but running craft doesn't work?

If you ran:

$ pip install masonite-cli --user

and then run:

$ craft

and get something like:

-bash: craft: command not found

then try closing your terminal and reopening it. If that doesn't work then you may be running a pip version connecting to Python 2.7. Try uninstalling it and reinstalling it using pip3:

$ pip uninstall masonite-cli
$ pip3 install masonite-cli

If that does not work then you may have to run sudo:

$ pip3 uninstall masonite-cli
$ sudo pip3 install masonite-cli

I'm getting this weird ModuleNotFound idna issue when running the craft new command

You may get a strange error like:

pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: The 'idna<2.7,>=2.5' distribution was not found and is required by requests

The simple fix may just be to run:

pip install --upgrade requests

If that doesn't work we can just go back to the lower idna version:

pip install idna==2.6

If that does not fix the issue then continue reading.

If the above fix did not work then this likely means you installed masonite-cli using the Python 2.7 pip command. Out of the box, all Mac and Linux based machines have Python 2.7. If you run:

$ python --version

you should get a return value of:

Python 2.7.14

But if you run:

$ python3 --version

you should get a return value of:

Python 3.6.5

Now pip commands are similar:

$ pip --version
pip 10.0.1 /location/of/installation (python 2.7)

$ pip3 --version
pip 10.0.1 /location/of/installation (python 3.6)

Notice here we are using 2 different Python installations.

So if you are getting this error you should uninstall masonite-cli from pip and reinstall it using pip3:

$ pip uninstall masonite-cli
$ pip3 install masonite-cli

You may have to run sudo to remove and install it and you may need to close your terminal to get it work if you are using a UNIX machine.

I installed masonite-cli successfully but the craft command is not showing up

If you installed everything successfully and running:

$ craft

Shows an error that it can't be found then try closing your terminal and opening it again. This should refresh any commands that were recently installed

If you still have errors and on a UNIX based machine try running:

$ sudo pip3 install masonite-cli

I'm getting a module urlib has no attribute urlopen

You likely ran:

$ craft new project_name

and hit this weird snag that throws this ambiguous error. You might think this is because of a Python version issue but craft is designed to work on Python 2.7 and 3.4+ (although 2.7 and not thoroughly tested) and you're years of Python experience would make you right but this is special. If you are getting this error then that means you are likely on a UNIX machine, Mac right?

The problem is that your machine does not have sufficient permissions to access these external calls from the command line because your machine does not have permission to do so. You will have to give you machine the command to do so by running:

$ /Applications/Python\ 3.6/Install\ Certificates.command

or whatever your Python 3 version is in the middle. Now try running:

$ craft new project_name

and it should work great!

Deprecation

Introduction

This page contains all deprecated code that may be removed in future versions of Masonite. These helpers are available to use for the remainder of the 2.1 lifetime but will be removed in either the next version (2.2) or the version after.

About Deprecation

Some code inside Masonite becomes obsolete as new features become available. In order to make maintaining the codebase easier and clutter free, Masonite will start emitting deprecation warnings during minor releases of the current release.

For example if you upgrade from 2.1.20 to 2.1.21, you may start seeing deprecation warnings inside your console. You can safely ignore these warnings and your code will still work fine but may not work when upgrading to the next major version (for example from 2.1 to 2.2).

What to do

When you see these deprecation warnings, you will see a link as well that comes to this page. You should scroll down this page for examples on how to get your code up to date and not in a deprecated state. You should do this as soon as it becomes convenient for you to do so.

Deprecated Code

No code is scheduled for deprecation as of yet. This can change with future versions of Masonite

What's New

Masonite 1.3

Introduction

Masonite 1.3 comes with a plethora of improvements over previous versioning. This version brings new features such as Queue and Mail drivers as well as various bug fixes.

Fixed infinite redirection

Previously when a you tried to redirect using the Request.redirect() method, Masonite would sometimes send the browser to an infinite redirection. This was because masonite was not resetting the redirection attributes of the Request class.

Fixed browser content length

Previously the content length in the request header was not being set correctly which led to the gunicorn server showing a warning that the content length did not match the content of the output.

Changed how request input data is retrieved

Previously the Request class simply got the input data on both POST and GET requests by converting the wsgi.input WSGI parameter into a string and parsing. All POST input data is now retrieved using FieldStorage which adds support for also getting files from multipart/formdata requests.

Added Upload drivers

You may now simply upload images to both disk and Amazon S3 storage right out of the box. With the new UploadProvider service provider you can simply do something like:

<html>
  <body>
      <form action="/upload" method="POST" enctype="multipart/formdata">
        <input type="file" name="file">
      </form>
  </body>
</html>

def show(self, Upload):
    Upload.store(Request.input('file'))

As well as support for Amazon S3 by setting the DRIVER to s3.

Added several helper functions

These helper functions are added functions to the builtin Python functions which can be used by simply calling them as usual:

def show(self):
    return view('welcome')

Notice how we never imported anything from the module or Service Container. See the Helper Functions documentation for a more exhaustive list

Added a way to have global template variables

Very often you will want to have a single variable accessible in all of your views, such as the Request object or other class. We can use the new View class for this and put it in it's own service provider:

def boot(self, View, Request):
    View.share({'request': Request})

Middleware is now resolved by the container

You can now specify anything that is in the container in your middleware constructor and it will be resolved automatically from the container

Added new domain method to the Get and Post classes

Specify the subdomain you want to target with your route. It's common to want to have separate routes for your public site and multi-tenant sites. This will now look something like:

Get().domain('test').route('/dashboard', 'DashboardController@show')

Which will target test.example.com/dashboard and not example.com/dashboard. Read more about subdomains in the Routing documentation.

Added new module method to Get and Post routes

By default, masonite will look for routes in the app/http/controllers namespace but you can change this for individual routes:

Get().module('thirdpary.routes').route('/dashboard', 'DashboardController@show')

This will look for the controller in the thirdparty.routes module.

Added Queues and Jobs

Masonite now ships with a QueueManager class which can be used to build queue drivers. Masonite ships with an async driver which sends jobs to a background thread. These queues can process Jobs which ca be created with the new craft job command. See the Queues and Jobs documentation for more information.

Masonite 1.4

Introduction

Masonite 1.4 brings several new features to Masonite. These features include caching, template caching, websocket support with Masonite calls Broadcasting and much more testing to make Masonite as stable as possible. If you would like to contribute to Masonite, please read the Contributing Guide and the How To Contribute documentation.

If you are upgrading from Masonite 1.3 then please read the Masonite 1.3 to 1.4 documentation.

Broadcast Support

We recognize that in order for frameworks to keep up with modern web application, they require real time broadcasting. Masonite 1.4 brings basic broadcasting of events to masonite and comes with two drivers out of the box: pusher and ably. If you'd like to create more drivers then you can do so easily by reading the About Drivers documentation. If you do create a driver, please consider making it available on PyPi so others can install it into their projects or open an issue on GitHub and make to add it to the built in drivers.

Caching

Masonite now has a built in caching class that you can use to either cache forever or cache for a specific amount of time.

Template Caching

Templates may have a lot of logic that are only updated every few minutes or even every few months. With template caching you can now cache your templates anywhere from every few seconds to every few years. This is an extremely powerful caching technique that will allow your servers to run less intensively and easily increase the performance of your application.

If a page gets hit 100 times every second then you can cache for 5, 10 or 15 seconds at a time to lessen the load on your server.

This feature only activates if you have the CacheProvider loaded in your PROVIDERS list. If you try to use these features without that provider then you will be hit with a RequiredContainerBindingNotFound exception letting you know you are missing a required binding from a service provider. This provider comes out of the box in Masonite 1.4.

PEP 8 Standards

We have also updated the code to closely conform to PEP 8 standards.

Added a New Folder and Configuration File

Because of the caching features, we have added a bootstrap/cache folder where all caching will be put but you can change this in the new config/cache.py file.

Added Contracts

Masonite 1.4 brings the idea of contracts which are very similar to interfaces in other languages. Contracts ensure that a driver or manager inherits has the same functionality across all classes of the same type.

Added CSRF Protection

Cross-Site Request Forgery is a crucial security milestone to hit and Masonite 1.4 brings that ability. With a new Service Provider and middleware, we can now add a simple {{ csrf_field }} to our forms and ensure we are protected from CSRF attacks.

Changed Managers

Managers were very redundant before this release so we made it much easier to create managers with 2 simple class attributes instead of the redundant method. Managers are used to manage features and drivers to Masonite.

Middleware is now resolved by the container

Now the constructor of all middleware is resolved by the container. This means you may use the IOC dependency injection techniques like controller methods and drivers.

Fixed unused imports

There were two unused imports in the models that Masonite created. These have been removed completely.

Masonite 1.5

Introduction

Masonite 1.5 is focused on a few bug fixes and changes to several core classes in order to expand on the support of third party package integration.

Masonite Entry

Masonite 1.5 is releasing also with a new official package for adding RESTful API's to your project. This package used API Resources which are classes that can add a plethora of capabilities to your API endpoints. You can read more about it at the documentation.

HTTP Methods

Masonite 1.5 also adds additional support HTTP methods like PUT, PATCH and DELETE. More information about these new routes can be found under the documentation

Moving Dependencies

Nearly all dependencies have been moved to the core Masonite package. The only thing inside the project that is installed using craft new is the WSGI server (which is waitress by default) and Masonite itself. This will improve the ability to change and update dependencies.

Changing Form Request Methods

HTML forms only support GET and POST so there is no the ability to add any other HTTP methods like PUT and PATCH which will change the actual request method on submission. You can read more about this in the documentation.

Added Shorthand Route Helpers

Removed API from core

In Masonite 1.4 and below was the Api() route which added some very basic API endpoints. All references to API's have been removed from core and added to the new Masonite Entry official package.

If you would like to use API's you will have to use the Masonite Entry package instead.

Headers

Cookies

Caching Driver Update

An All New Craft Command

Adding Commands

Adding Migration Directories

Added Sessions

You can now add data to sessions using the new Sessions feature which comes with a memory and cookie driver for storing data.

Craft Auto Adds Site Packages

In previous versions, Masonite has not been able to fetch the site packages directory if you were in a virtual environment because virtual environment directories are dynamically named depending on who created it. We have found a way to detect the virtual environment and the site packages directory so now there is no need to add the site packages directory manually to the packages configuration file

Masonite 1.6

Introduction

Masonite 1.6 brings mostly minor changes to the surface layer of Masonite. This release brings a lot of improvements to the engine of Masonite and sets up the framework for the release of 2.0.

HttpOnly Cookies

Previously, all cookies were set with an HttpOnly flag when setting cookies. This change came after reading several articles about how cookies can be read from Javascript libraries, which is fine, unless those Javascript libraries have been compromised which could lead to a malicious hacker sending your domain name and session cookies to a third party. There is no the ability to turn the HttpOnly flag off when setting cookies by creating cookies like:

request().cookie('key', 'value', http_only=False)

Moved Commands

Because craft is it's own tool essentially and it needs to work across Masonite versions, all commands have been moved into the Masonite repository itself. Now each version of Masonite maintains it's own commands. The new craft version is 2.0

pip install masonite-cli==2.0 --user

Drivers Can Now Change To Other Drivers

Before, you had to use the Manager class associated with a driver to switch a driver. For example:

def show(self, Upload, UploadManager):
    Upload.store(...) # default driver
    UploadManager.driver('s3').store(...) # switched drivers

Now you can switch drivers from the driver itself:

def show(self, Upload):
    Upload.store(...) # default driver
    Upload.driver('s3').store(...) # switched drivers

New Absolute Controllers Syntax

This version has been fine tuned for adding packages to Masonite. This version will come along with a new Masonite Billing package. The development of Masonite Billing has discovered some rough spots in package integrations. One of these rough spots were adding controllers that were not in the project. For example, Masonite Billing allows adding a controller that handles incoming Stripe webhooks. Although this was possible before this release, Masonite 1.6 has added a new syntax:

ROUTES = [
    ...
    # Old Syntax:
    Get().route('/url/here', 'Controller@show').module('billing.controllers')

    # New Syntax:
    Get().route('/url/here', '/billing.controllers.Controller@show')
    ...
]

Notice the new forward slash in the beginning where the string controller goes.

Changed How Controllers Are Created

Previously, controllers were created as they were specified. For example:

$ craft controller DashboardController

created a DashboardController. Now the "Controller" part of the controller is appended by default for you. Now we can just specify:

$ craft controller Dashboard

to create our DashboardController. You may was to actually just create a controller called Dashboard. We can do this by specifying a flag:

$ craft controller Dashboard -e

short for "exact"

Added Resource Controllers

It's also really good practice to create 1 controller per "action type." For example we might have a BlogController and a PostController. It's easy to not be sure what action should be in what controllers or what to name your actions. Now you can create a "Resource Controller" which will give you a list of actions such as show, store, create, update etc etc. If what you want to do does not fit with an action you have then you may want to consider making another controller (such as an AuthorController)

You can now create these Resource Controllers like:

craft controller Dashboard -r

Added Global Views

Just like the global controllers, some packages may require you to add a view that is located in their package (like the new exception debug view in 1.6) so you may now add views in different namespaces:

def show(self):
    return view('/masonite/views/index')

This will get a template that is located in the masonite package itself.

Added Route Groups

You can now group routes based on a specific string prefix. This will now look like:

routes/web.py

from masonite.helpers.routes import get, group
ROUTES = [
    get('/home', ...)
    group('/dashboard', [
        get('/user', ...)
        get('/user/1')
    ])
]

which will compile down into /dashboard/user and /dashboard/user/1

Changed Container Resolving

The container was one of the first features coded in the 1.x release line. For Masonite 1.6 we have revisited how the container resolves objects. Before this release you had to put all annotation classes in the back of the parameter list:

from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, Upload, request: Request):
    pass

If we put the annotation in the beginning it would have thrown an error because of how the container resolved.

Now we can put them in any order and the container will grab each one and resolve it.

from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, Upload, request: Request, Broadcast):
    pass

This will now work when previously it did not.

Resolving Instances

The container will now resolve instances of classes as well. It's a common paradigm to "code to an interface and not an implementation." Because of this paradigm, Masonite comes with contracts that act as interfaces but in addition to this, we can also resolve instances of classes.

For example, all Upload drivers inherit the UploadContract contract so we can simply resolve the UploadContract which will return an Upload Driver:

from masonite.contracts.UploadContract import UploadContract

def show(self, upload: UploadContract):
    upload.store(...)

Notice here that we annotated an UploadContract but got back the actual upload driver.

Container Collection

You can now search the container and "collect" objects from it by key using the new collect method:

app.collect('Sentry*Hook')

which will find all keys in the container such as SentryExceptionHook and SentryWebHook and make a new dictionary out of them.

Removed Some Dependencies

A complaint a few developers pointed out was that Masonite has too many dependencies. Masonite added Pusher, Ably and Boto3 packages by default which added a bit of overhead, especially if developers have no intentions on real time event broadcasting (which most applications probably won't). These dependencies have now been removed and will throw an exception if they are used without the required dependencies.

Framework Hooks

Masonite 1.6 + will slowly be rolling out various framework hooks. These hooks will allow developers and third party packages to integrate into various events that are fired throughout the framework. Currently there is the abilitity to tie into the exception hook which will call any objects loaded into the container whenever an exception is hit. This is great if you want to add things like Sentry into your project. Other hooks will be implemented such as View, Mail and Upload Hooks.

Masonite 2.0

Masonite 2 brings an incredible new release to the Masonite family. This release brings a lot of new features to Masonite to include new status codes, database seeding, built in cron scheduling, controller constructor resolving, auto-reloading server, a few new internal ways that Masonite handles things, speed improvements to some code elements and so much more. We think developers will be extremely happy with this release.

Upgrading from Masonite 1.6 to Masonite 2.0 shouldn't take very long. On an average sized project, this upgrade should take around 30 minutes. We'll walk you through the changes you have to make to your current project and explain the reasoning behind it.

Checkout the Upgrade Guide for Masonite 1.6 to 2.0

Controller Constructors

Controller constructors are now resolved by the container so this removed some redundancy within your code and any duplicated auto resolving can now be directly in your constructor:

from masonite.request import Request

class YourController:
    def __init__(self, request: Request):
        self.request = Request
    
    def show(self):
        print(self.request) # <class masonite.request.Request>

Read more in the Controllers documentation.

Tinker Command

There is a new command that starts a Python shell and imports the container for you already. Test it out to verify that objects are loaded into your container correctly. It's a great debugging tool.

$ craft tinker

Read more in The Craft Command Introduction documentation.

Show Routes Command

Masonite 2 ships with an awesome little helper command that allows you to see all the routes in your application

$ craft show:routes

Read more in The Craft Command Introduction documentation.

Server Reloading

A huge update to Masonite is the new --reload flag on the serve command. Now the server will automatically restart when it detects a file change. You can use the -r flag as a shorthand:

$ craft serve -r

Read more in The Craft Command Introduction documentation.

Autoloading

An incredible new feature is autoloading support. You can now list directories in the new AUTOLOAD constant in your config/application.py file and it will automatically load all classes into the container. This is great for loading command and models into the container when the server starts up.

You can also use this class as a standalone class in your own service providers.

Updated Libraries

Updated all libraries to the latest version with the exception of the Pendulum library which latest version is a breaking change and therefore was left out. The breaking change would not be worth it to add the complexity of upgrading so you may upgrade on a per project basis.

Removed Importing Duplicate Class Names

Previously you had to import classes like:

from masonite.drivers.UploadDriver import UploadDriver

Now you can simply specify:

from masonite.drivers import UploadDriver

Because of this change we no longer need the same duplicated class names in the PROVIDERS list either.

Read more about changing duplicated class names under the Duplicate Class Names documentation.

Redirection Provider

Removed the need for the redirection provider completely. You need to remove this from your PROVIDERS list.

Redirection

Renamed Request.redirectTo to Request.redirect_to

Also removed the .send() method and moved the dictionary into a parameter:

def show(self):
    return request().redirect('/dashboard/@id', {'id': '5'})

Read more in the Requests documentation.

Request Only

Added a new Request.only method to fetch only specific inputs needed.

Get Request Method

Added a new Request.get_request_method() method to the Request class.

New Argument in Request.all

You can now completely remove fetching of any inputs that Masonite handles internally such as __token and __method when fetching any inputs. This is also great for building third party libraries:

Request.all(internal_variables=False)

Made several changes to the CSRF Middleware

Because of the changes to internal framework variables, there are several changes to the CSRF middleware that comes in every application of Masonite.

Be sure to read the changes in the Upgrade Guide 1.6 to 2.0.

Added Scheduler to Masonite

Added a new default package to Masonite that allows scheduling recurring tasks:

Read about Masonite Scheduler under the Task Scheduling documentation.

Added Database Seeding Support

It's important during development that you have the ability to seed your database with dummy data. This will improve team development with Masonite to get everyones database setup accordingly.

Read more in the Database Seeding documentation.

Added a New Static File Helper

Now all templates have a new static function in them to improve rendering of static assets

Read more in the Static Files documentation.

Added a New Password Helper

You can use the password helper to hash passwords more simply than using straight bcrypt:

from masonite.helpers import password

password('secret') # returns bcrypt password

Read more in the Encryption documentation.

Added Dot Notation To Upload Drivers And Dictionary Support To Driver Locations.

You can now specify which location in your drivers you want to upload to using a new dot notation:

Upload.store(request().input('file'), 'disk.uploads')

This will use the directory stored in:

DRIVERS = {
  'disk': {
    'uploads': 'storage/uploads',
    'profiles': 'storage/static/users/profiles/images'
  },
  ...
}

Read more in the Uploading documentation.

Added Status Code Provider

Masonite 2 removes the bland error codes such as 404 and 500 errors and replaces them with a cleaner view. This also allows you to add custom error pages.

Read more in the Status Codes documentation.

Added Explicitly Imported Providers

Providers are now explicitly imported at the top of the file and added to your PROVIDERS list which is now located in config/providers.py. This completely removes the need for string providers and boosts the performance of the application sustantially

Masonite 2.1

Introduction

Masonite 2.1 introduces a few new changes that are designed to correct course for the 2.x family and ensure we can go far into the 2.x family without having to make huge breaking changes. It was questionable whether we should break from the 2.x family and start a new 3.x line. The biggest question was removing (actually disabling) the ability to resolve parameters and go with the more favorable annotation resolving. That could have made Masonite a 3.x line but we have ultimately decided to go with the 2.1 as a course correction. Below you will find all changes that went into making 2.1 awesome. Nearly all of these changes are breaking changes.

All classes in core now have docstrings

It is much easier to contribute to Masonite now since nearly classes have awesome docstrings explaining what they do, their dependencies and what they return.

Auto Resolving Parameters

We have completely removed parameter resolving. We can no longer resolve like this:

def show(self, Request):
    return Request.redirect('/')

in favor of the more explicit:

from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, request: Request):
    return request.redirect('/')

This is a bit of a big change and will be most of the time spent on refactoring your application to upgrade to Masonite 2.1. If you already used the more explicit version then you won't have to worry about this change. It is still possible to resolve parameters by passing that keyword argument to your container to activate that feature:

container = App(resolve_parameters=True)

This should help with upgrading from 2.0 to 2.1 until you have refactored your application. Then you should deactivate this keyword argument so you can be in line with future 2.x releases.

You can choose to keep it activated if that is how you want to create applications but it won't be officially supported by packages, future releases or in the documentation.

Class Middleware

All middleware are now classes:

HTTP_MIDDLEWARE = [
    LoadUserMiddleware,
    CsrfMiddleware,
    ResponseMiddleware,
]

this is different from the previous string based middleware

HTTP_MIDDLEWARE = [
    'app.http.middleware.LoadUserMiddleware.LoadUserMiddleware',
    'app.http.middleware.CsrfMiddleware.CsrfMiddleware',
    'app.http.middleware.JsonResponseMiddleware.JsonResponseMiddleware',
]

Removed the Payload Input

Previously when getting an incoming JSON response, we had to get the values via the payload input like so:

from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, request: Request):
    return request.input('payload')['id']

which was kind of strange in hindsight. Now we can just straight up use the input:

from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, request: Request):
    return request.input('id')

Again this is only a change for incoming JSON responses. Normal form inputs remain the same.

Removed the facades module.

Previously we had a facades module but it was being unused and we didn't see a future for this module so we moved the only class in this module to it's own class. All instances of:

from masonite.facades.Auth import Auth

now become:

from masonite.auth import Auth

Provider Refactoring

Route Provider

Moved parameter parsing into if statement

We also noticed that for some reason we were parsing parameters before we found routes but we only ever needed those parameters inside our routes so we were parsing them whether we found a route or not. We moved the parsing of parameters into the if statement that executes when a route is found.

When we say "parsing route parameters" we mean the logic required to parse this:

/dashboard/@user/@id

into a usable form to use on the request class this:

from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.param('user')
    request.param('id')

StartResponse Provider

This provider has been completely removed for the more recommended ResponseMiddleware which will need to be added to your HTTP middleware list:

from masonite.middleware import ResponseMiddleware
..
HTTP_MIDDLEWARE=[
    ...
    ResponseMiddleware,
]

Moved parameter parsing into if statement

When we say "parsing route parameters" we mean the logic required to parse this:

/dashboard/@user/@id

into a usable form to use on the request class this:

from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.param('user')
    request.param('id')

StartResponse Provider

This provider has been completely removed for the more recommended ResponseMiddleware which will need to be added to your HTTP middleware list:

from masonite.middleware import ResponseMiddleware
..
HTTP_MIDDLEWARE=[
    ...
    ResponseMiddleware,
]

Moved parameter parsing into if statement

When we say "parsing route parameters" we mean the logic required to parse this:

/dashboard/@user/@id

into a usable form to use on the request class this:

from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.param('user')
    request.param('id')

Added ability use dot notation for views

You can now optionally use . instead of / in your views:

def show(self, view: View):
    return view.render('dashboard.user.show')

Moved the CsrfMiddleware into core and extended it

We moved the CSRF middleware completely into the core framework and allow developers to extend from it now. This will allow us to fix any security bugs that are apart of the CSRF feature.

You may see this pattern a lot in the future which is only extending classes from the core framework so we can hot fix things much better.

Completely cleaned the project

Masonite now has a plethora of docstrings on each and every class by default to really give the developer an understanding about what each default class is actually doing and what it is dependent on.

Masonite is also much more PEP 8 compliant. We removed all instances of triple single quotes: ''' for the more preferred and PEP 8 compliant double quotes """ for docstrings.

We also cleaned a lot of the classes generated by the auth command since those were pretty ugly.

Removed Helper functions by default

We also removed all instances of helper functions by default since it was confusing developers and was throwing red squiggly marks for text editors. They are still available to be used but they will not be known to developers unless they discover them in the documentation. Now all default code explicitly resolves via the container and helper functions can be used on the developers own terms.

Helper functions are still available but you will need to use them on your own terms.

Added seeds by default

Now every application has a basic seeding structure setup which is the same as if running the craft seed command. This is to promote more use of this awesome feature which can be used in migration files for quick seeding of databases for development.

Added code to init.py file in migrations and seeds

We were previously not able to import code into our migration files or database seeders because the command line tool would not pick up our current working directory to import classes into. Now the migrations module and seeds module have 3 lines of code:

import os
import sys
sys.path.append(os.getcwd())

this helpers when running the command line to import code into these modules.

Route Printing

In development you would see a message like:

GET Route: /dashboard

When you hit a route in development mode. Well you would also hit it in production mode too since that was never turned off. Although this is likely fine, it would slow down the framework significantly under load since it takes a bit of resources to print something that didn't need to be printed. This enables a bit of a performance boost.

Added migrate:status Command

This command gets the statuses of all migrations in all directories. To include third party migration directories that are added to your project.

Added `simple` container bindings

Sometimes you do not need to bind an object to any key, you just want the object in the container. For this you can now do simple bindings like this:

app.simple(Obj())

Added a new global mail helper

This new mail helper can be used globally which points to the default mail driver:

def show(self):
    mail_helper().to(..)

Removed the need for `|safe` filters on built in template helpers.

We no longer need to do:

{{ csrf_field|safe }}

We can now simply do:

{{ csrf_field }}

Improved setting status codes

Previously we had to specify the status code as a string:

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.status('500 Internal Server Error')

in order for these to be used properly. Now we can just specify the status code:

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.status(500)

Added several new methods to service providers

There is quite a bit of things to remember when binding various things into the container. For example when binding commands, the key needs to be postfixed with Command like ModelCommand. Now we can do things like:

def register(self):
    self.commands(Command1(), Command2())

Along with this there are several other methods to help you bind things into the container without having to remember all the special rules involved, if any.

Added View Routes

We now have View Routes on all instances of the normal HTTP classes:

Get().view('/url', 'some/template', {'key': 'value'})

Renamed cache_exists to exists

We previously used this method on the Cache class like so:

def show(self, Cache):
    Cache.cache_exists('key')

Now we removed the cache_ prefix and it is just:

from masonite import Cache

def show(self, cache: Cache):
    cache.exists('key')

Added without method to request class

We can now use the .without() method on the request class which returns all inputs except the ones specified:

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.without('key1', 'key2')

Added port to database

Previously the port was missing from the database configuration settings. This was fine when using the default connection but did not work unless added to the config.

Added ability to use a dictionary for setting headers.

Instead of doing something like:

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.header('key1', 'value1')
    request.header('key2', 'value2')

We can now use a dictionary:

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.header({
        'key1': 'value1',
        'key2': 'value2'
    })

Added a new Match route

We can now specify a route with multiple HTTP methods. This can be done like so:

from masonite.routes import Match

Match(['GET', 'POST']).route('/url', 'SomeController@show')

Added Masonite Events into core

Core can now emit events that can be listened to through the container.

Added ability to set email verification

Now you can setup a way to send email verifications into your user signup workflow simply but inherting a class to your User model.

Request redirection set status codes

Now all redirections set the status code implicitly instead of explicitly needing to set them.

Added craft middleware command

Now you can use craft middleware MiddlewareName in order to scaffold middleware like other classes.

View can use dot notation

All views can optionally use dot notation instead of foward slashes:

return view.render('some/template/here')

is the same as:

return view.render('some.template.here')

Added Swap to container

We can now do container swapping which is swapping out a class when it is resolved. In other words we may want to change what objects are returned when certain objects are resolved. These objects do not have to be in the container in the first place.

Added a new env function

You can now use a env function to automatically type cast your environment variables turning a numeric into an int:

from masonite import env

env('DB_PORT', '5432') #== 5432 (int)

Added ability to resolve with paramaters at the same time

You can now resolve from a container with a parameter list in addition to custom parameters.

Added password reset to auth command

In addition to all the awesome things that craft auth generates, we now generate password reset views and controllers as well for you

Route Compiler

Fixed an issue where custom route compilers was not working well with request parameters

Added Database Seeders

All new 2.1 projects have a seeder setup so you can quickly make some mock users to start off your application. All users have a randomly generated email and the password of "secret".

You can run seeders by running:

$ craft seed:run

Made HTTP Prefix to None by Default

When setting headers we had to set the http_prefix to None more times then not. So it is set by default.

This:

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.header('Content-Type', 'application/xml', http_prefix=None)

can change to:

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.header('Content-Type', 'application/xml')

Getting a header returns blank string rather than None

Originally the code:

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.header('Content-Type') #== ''

would return None if there was no header. Now this returns a blank string.

Added Maintenance Mode

There is now an up and down command so you can put that in your application in a maintenance state via craft commands:

$ craft down

$ craft up

There is also a new MaintenanceModeMiddleware:

from masonite.middleware import MaintenanceModeMiddleware

HTTP_MIDDLEWARE = [
    ...
    MaintenanceModeMiddleware,
    ...
]

Removed Store Prepend method

We removed the store_prepend() method on the upload drivers for the filename keyword arg on the store method.

So this:

upload.store_prepend('random-string', request.input('file'))

now becomes:

upload.store(request.input('file'), filename='random-string')

Masonite 2.2

Route Prefixes

Previously you had to append all routes with a / character. This would look something like:

Get('/some/url')

You can now optionally prefix this without a / character:

Get('some/url')

URL parameters can now optionally be retrieved from the controller definition

Previously we had to do something like:

def show(self, view: View, request: Request):
    user = User.find(request.param('user_id'))
    return view.render('some.template', {'user': user})

Now we can optionally get the parameter from the method definition:

def show(self, user_id, view: View):
    user = User.find(user_id)
    return view.render('some.template', {'user': user})

Learn more in the Controllers documentation here.

Added a storage manager and disk storage drivers

This is used as a wrapper around I/O operations. It will also be a wrapper around the upload drivers and moving files around and other file management type operations

Async driver now can be specified whether to use threading or processing

We can now specify directly in the configuration file whether or not the threading or multiprocessing for the async type operations.

Learn more in the Queues documentation here.

Added new HTTP Verbs

We added 4 new HTTP verbs: HEAD, CONNECT, OPTIONS, TRACE. You import these and use them like normal:

from masonite.routes import Connect, Trace
ROUTES = [
    Connect('..'),
    Trace('..'),
]

Learn more in the Routes documentation here.

JSON error responses

If the incoming request is a JSON request, Masonite will now return all errors as JSON

{
  "error": {
    "exception": "Invalid response type of <class 'set'>",
    "status": 500,
    "stacktrace": [
        "/Users/joseph/Programming/core/bootstrap/start.py line 38 in app",
        "/Users/joseph/Programming/core/masonite/app.py line 149 in resolve",
        "/Users/joseph/Programming/core/masonite/providers/RouteProvider.py line 92 in boot",
        "/Users/joseph/Programming/core/masonite/response.py line 105 in view"
    ]
  }
}

Rearranged Drivers into their own folders

This is more of an internal change for Core itself.

Craft serve command defaults to auto-reloading

Before we had to specify that we wanted the server to auto-reload by specifying a -r flag:

$ craft serve -r

Now we can just specify the serve command it will default to auto-reloading:

$ craft serve

You can now specify it to NOT auto-reload by passing in 1 of these 2 commands:

$ craft serve -d
$ craft serve --dont-reload

Learn more in the Craft commands documentation here.

Added Accept('*') to drivers

By default you can only upload image files because of security reasons but now you can disable that by doing an accept('*') option:

def show(self, upload: Upload):
    upload.accept('*').store(request.input('file'))

Learn more in the Uploading documentation here.

Added much more view helpers

Learn more in the Views documentation here.

All Tests are now unittests

We moved from pytest to unittests for test structures.

Learn more in the Testing documentation here.

Added a better way to run database tests

Added a new DatabaseTestcase so we can properly setup and teardown our database. This works for sqlite databases by default to prevent your actual database from being destroyed.

The back view helper now defaults to the current path

Before in templates we had to specify a path to go back to but most of the time we wanted to go back to the current path.

Instead of:

<form ..>
    {{ back(request().path) }}
</form>

We can now do:

<form ..>
    {{ back() }}
</form>

In order to learn how to use this you can visit the documentation here.

Learn more in the Requests documentation here.

Added a completely new validation library

We built a new validation library from scratch and completely ripped out the old validation code. Any current validation code will need to be updated to the new way.

The new way is MUCH better. You can read about it in the new validation section here.

Learn more in the Validation documentation here.

Auth class does not need the request class.

Previously we needed to pass in the request object to the Auth class like this:

from masonite.auth import Auth
from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, request: Request):
    Auth(request).login(..)

Now we have it a bit cleaner and you can just resolve it and the request class will be injected for you

from masonite.auth import Auth
from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, request: Request, auth: Auth):
    auth.login(..)

Completely changed how classes are resolved on the backend

You may not notice anything but now if you bind a class into the container like this:

from masonite.auth import Auth

def register(self):
    self.app.bind('Auth', Auth)

It will be resolved when you resolve it:

from masonite.auth import Auth

def show(self, auth: Auth):
    auth.login(..)

This is why the Auth class no longer needs to accept the request class. Masonite will inject the request class for you when you resolve the class.

This works with all classes and even your custom classes to help manage your application dependencies

Added new register method to the `Auth` class.

You can now do something like:

from masonite.auth import Auth

def show(self, auth: Auth):
    auth.register({
        'name': 'Joe',
        'email': 'joe@email.com',
        'password': 'secret'
    })

Learn more in the Authentication documentation here.

Changed all regex compiling to be done before the server starts

Previously, each route's regex was being compiled when Masonite checked for it but we realized this was redundant. So now all route compiling is done before the server starts.

This has given Masonite a bit of a speed boost.

Container Remembering

Masonite now has the ability to remember the previous container bindings for each object. This can speed of resolving your code by 10-15x. This is disabled by default as it is still not clear what kind of issues this can cause.

This is scheduled to be set by default in the next major version of Masonite

Learn more in the Service Container documentation here.

Added a new `with_errors()` method in order to cut down on setting an errors session.

Now instead of doing this:

from masonite.request import Request
from masonite.validation import Validator

def show(self, request: Request, validate: Validator):
    errors = request.validate(
      validate.required('user')
    )

    if errors:
      request.session.flash('errors', errors)
      return request.back()

we can now shorten down the flashing of errors and do:

from masonite.request import Request
from masonite.validation import Validator

def show(self, request: Request, validate: Validator):
    errors = request.validate(
      validate.required('user')
    )

    if errors:
      return request.back().with_errors(errors)

Learn more in the Requests documentation here.

Upgrade Guide

Masonite 1.3 to 1.4

Introduction

Masonite 1.4 brings several new features and a few new files. This is a very simple upgrade and most of the changes were done in the pip package of Masonite. The upgrade from 1.3 to 1.4 should take less than 10 minutes

Requirements.txt File

This requirement file has the masonite>=1.3,<=1.3.99 requirement. This should be changed to masonite>=1.4,<=1.4.99. You should also run pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt to upgrade the Masonite pip package.

New Cache Folder

There is now a new cache folder under bootstrap/cache which will be used to store any cached files you use with the caching feature. Simply create a new bootstrap/cache folder and optionally put a .gitignore file in it so your source control will pick it up.

New Cache and Broadcast Configuration

Masonite 1.4 brings a new config/cache.py and config/broadcast.py files. These files can be found on the GitHub page and can be copied and pasted into your project. Take a look at the new config/cache.py file and the config/broadcast.py file. Just copy and paste those configuration files into your project.

3 New Service Providers

Masonite comes with a lot of out of the box functionality and nearly all of it is optional but Masonite 1.4 ships with three new providers. Most Service Providers are not ran on every request and therefore does not add significant overhead to each request. To add these 3 new Service Providers simple add these to the bottom of the list of framework providers:

PROVIDERS = [
    # Framework Providers
    ...
    'masonite.providers.HelpersProvider.HelpersProvider',
    'masonite.providers.QueueProvider.QueueProvider',

    # 3 New Providers in Masonite 1.4
    'masonite.providers.BroadcastProvider.BroadcastProvider',
    'masonite.providers.CacheProvider.CacheProvider',
    'masonite.providers.CsrfProvider.CsrfProvider',

    # Third Party Providers

    # Application Providers
    'app.providers.UserModelProvider.UserModelProvider',
    'app.providers.MiddlewareProvider.MiddlewareProvider',
]

Note however that if you add the CsrfProvider then you will also need the CSRF middleware which is new in Masonite 1.4. Read the section below to add the middleware

CSRF and CSRF Middleware

Masonite 1.4 adds CSRF protection. So anywhere there is any POST form request, you will need to add the {{ csrf_field }} to it. For example:

<form action="/dashboard" method="POST">
    {{ csrf_field }}
    <input type="text" name="first_name">
</form>

This type of protection prevents cross site forgery. In order to activate this feature, we also need to add the CSRF middleware. Copy and paste the middleware into your project under the app/http/middleware/CsrfMiddleware.py file.

Lastly, put that middleware into the HTTP_MIDDLEWARE list inside config/middleware.py like so:

HTTP_MIDDLEWARE = [
    'app.http.middleware.LoadUserMiddleware.LoadUserMiddleware',
    'app.http.middleware.CsrfMiddleware.CsrfMiddleware',
]

Changes to Database Configuration

There has been a slight change in the constants used in the config/database.py file. Mainly just for consistency and coding standards. Your file may have some slight changes but this change is optional. If you do make this change, be sure to change any places in your code where you have used the Orator Query Builder. For example any place you may have:

from config import database

database.db.table(...)

should now be:

from config import database

database.DB.table(...)

with this change

Masonite 1.4 to 1.5

Introduction

Masonite 1.5 doesn't bring many file changes to Masonite so this upgrade is fairly straight forward and should take less than 10 minutes.

Requirements.txt

All requirements are now gone with the exception of the WSGI server (waitress) and the Masonite dependency. You should remove all dependencies and only put:

waitress==1.1.0
masonite>=1.5,<=1.5.99

Site Packages Configuration

If you have added your site packages directory to our packages configuration file, you can now remove this because Craft commands can now detect your site packages directory in your virtual environment.

Api Removal

Remove the masonite.providers.ApiProvider.ApiProvider from the PROVIDERS list as this has been removed completely in 1.5

If you are using the Api() route inside routes/api.py for API endpoints then remove this as well. You will need to implement API endpoints using the new Official Masonite Entry package instead.

You'll also have to add a new RESOURCES = [] line to your routes/api.py file for the new Masonite Entry package if you choose to use it.

Craft Commands

This release works with the new craft command release. Upgrade to version masonite-cli / 1.1+. <1.1 will only work with Masonite 1.4 and below.

Simply run:

$ pip install --upgrade masonite-cli

You may have to run sudo if you are using a UNIX machine.

Sessions

Masonite 1.5 now has sessions that can be used to hold temporary data. It comes with the cookie and memory drivers. Memory stores all data in a class which is lost when the server restarts and the cookie driver sets cookies in the browser.

There is a new config/session.py file you can copy and paste:

''' Session Settings '''

'''
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Session Driver
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Sessions are able to be linked to an individual user and carry data from
| request to request. The memory driver will store all the session data
| inside memory which will delete when the server stops running.
|
| Supported: 'memory', 'cookie'
| 
'''

DRIVER = 'memory'

As well as add the SessionProvider inside your PROVIDERS list just below the AppProvider:

PROVIDERS = [
    # Framework Providers
    'masonite.providers.AppProvider.AppProvider',

    # New Provider
    'masonite.providers.SessionProvider.SessionProvider',
    'masonite.providers.RouteProvider.RouteProvider',
    ....
]

Finished

That's it! You have officially upgrades to Masonite 1.5

Masonite 1.5 to 1.6

Introduction

Not much has changed in the actual project structure of Masonite 1.6 so we just need to make some minor changes to our existing 1.5 project

Requirements.txt

We just have to change our Masonite dependency version in this file:

...
masonite>=1.6,<=1.6.99

Bootstrap/start.py

Masonite 1.6 now wraps the majority of the application in a try and catch block so we can add exception handling such as the new debug view and other exception features down the road such as Sentry and other error logging.

In the middle of the file (line 45 if you have not made changes to this file) we can simply wrap the application:

try:
    for provider in container.make('Application').PROVIDERS:
        located_provider = locate(provider)().load_app(container)
        if located_provider.wsgi is True:
            container.resolve(located_provider.boot)
except Exception as e:
    container.make('ExceptionHandler').load_exception(e)

This will also display an exception view whenever an exception is it.

Finished

That's all the changes we have to make for our project.

Read What's New in Masonite 1.6 for any futher changes you may want or have to make to your code base.

Masonite 1.6 to 2.0

Upgrading from Masonite 1.6 to Masonite 2.0 shouldn't take very long although it does have the largest amount of changes in a single release. On an average sized project, this upgrade should take around 30 minutes. We'll walk you through the changes you have to make to your current project and explain the reasoning behind it

Application and Provider Configuration

Masonite 2 adds some improvements with imports. Previously we had to import providers and drivers like:

from masonite.providers.UploadProvider import UploadProvider

Because of this, all framework Service Providers will need to cut out the redundant last part. The above code should be changed to:

from masonite.providers import UploadProvider

Masonite 2 brings a more explicit way of declaring Service Providers in your application. You'll need to take your current PROVIDERS list inside the config/application.py file and move it into a new config/providers.py file.

Now all Service Providers should be imported at top of the file and added to the list:

config/providers.py

from masonite.providers import (
    AppProvider,
    SessionProvider,
    RouteProvider
)

...

PROVIDERS = [
    # Framework Providers
    AppProvider,
    SessionProvider,
    RouteProvider,
    ....
]

String providers will still work but it is not recommended and will not be supported in current and future releases of Masonite.

WSGI changes

There are a few changes in the wsgi.py file and the bootstrap/start.py file.

In the wsgi.py file we should add a new import at the top:

...
# from pydoc import locate - Remove This
...
from config import application, providers
...

container.bind('WSGI', app)
container.bind('Application', application)

# New Additions Here
container.bind('ProvidersConfig', providers)
container.bind('Providers', providers)
container.bind('WSGIProviders', providers)

Then change the code logic of bootstrapping service providers from:

wsgi.py

for provider in container.make('Application').PROVIDERS:
    locate(provider)().load_app(container).register()
    
for provider in container.make('Application').PROVIDERS: 
    located_provider = locate(provider)().load_app(container)
    if located_provider.wsgi is False:
        container.resolve(locate(provider)().load_app(container).boot)

to:

wsgi.py

 for provider in container.make('ProvidersConfig').PROVIDERS: 
    located_provider = provider()
    located_provder.load_app(container).register()
    if located_provider.wsgi:
        container.make('WSGIProviders').append(located_provider)
     else:
        container.resolve(located_provider.boot)
        container.make('Providers').append(located_provider)

and change the logic in bootstrap/start.py to:

bootstrap/start.py

for provider in container.make('WSGIProviders'): 
    container.resolve(located_provider.boot)

Notice here we split the providers list when the server first boots up into two lists which significantly lowers the overhead of each request.

This change should significantly boost speed performances as providers no longer have to be located via pydoc. You should see an immediate decrease in the time it takes for the application to serve a request. Rough time estimates say that this change should increase the request times by about 5x as fast.

Duplicate Class Names

Again, with the addition of the above change, any place you have a duplicated class name like:

from masonite.drivers.UploadDriver import UploadDriver

You can change it to:

from masonite.drivers import UploadDriver

Redirection

Renamed Request.redirectTo to Request.redirect_to. Be sure to change any of these instances accordingly.

All instances of:

return request().redirectTo('home')

should be changed to:

return request().redirect_to('home')

Redirect Send Method

Also removed the .send() method completely on the Request class so all instances of:

def show(self):
    return request().redirect('/dashboard/@id').send({'id': league.id})

Need to be changed to:

def show(self):
    return request().redirect('/dashboard/@id', {'id': league.id})

CSRF Middleware

Some variable internals have changed to prepend a double underscore to them to better symbolize they are being handled internally. Because of this we need to change any instances of csrf_token to __token in the CSRF Middleware file.

You can check for what the class should look like from the MasoniteFramework/masonite repository

Autoloading

Masonite 2 comes with a new autoloader. This can load all classes in any directory you specify right into the Service Container when the server first starts. This is incredibly useful for loading your models, commands or tasks right into the container.

Simply add a new AUTOLOAD constant in your config/application.py file. This is the entire section of the autoload configuration.

config/application.py

'''
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Autoload Directories
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| List of directories that are used to find classes and autoload them into 
| the Service Container. This is initially used to find models and load
| them in but feel free to autoload any directories
|
'''

AUTOLOAD = [
    'app',
]

By default this points to the app directory where models are stored by default but if you moved your models to other directories like app/models or app/admin/models then add those directories to your list:

config/application.py

....

AUTOLOAD = [
    'app',
    'app/models',
    'app/admin/models'
]

Be caution that this will autoload all models into the Service Container with the class name as the key and the class as the binding.

RedirectionProvider

Because of a minor rewrite of the Request class, we now do not need the RedirectionProvider. You can remove the RedirectionProvider completely in your PROVIDERS list.

StatusCodeProvider

There is a new status code provider which adds support for adding custom status codes and rendering better default status code pages such as 400 and 500 error pages. This should be added right above the StartResponseProvider:

config/application.py

PROVIDERS = [
    # Framework Providers
    ...
    'masonite.providers.RouteProvider',
    'masonite.providers.RedirectionProvider',
    
    # New provider here above StartResponseProvider
    'masonite.providers.StatusCodeProvider',
    
    'masonite.providers.StartResponseProvider',
    'masonite.providers.WhitenoiseProvider',
    ...
]

.env File

The .env got a small upgrade and in order to make the APP_DEBUG variable consistent, it should be set to either True or False. Previously this was set to something like true or false.

.env

APP_DEBUG=True
# or
APP_DEBUG=False

Masonite 2 also removed the APP_LOG_LEVEL environment variable completely.

Finished

That's it! You're all done upgrading Masonite 1.6 to Masonite 2.0. Build something awesome!

Be sure to read about all the changes in Masonite 2 to ensure that your application is completely up to date with many of the latest decisions and be sure to thoroughly test your application. Feel free to open an issue if any problems arise during upgrading.

Masonite 2.0 to 2.1

Introduction

Masonite 2.1 is a fantastic release. It works out a lot of the kinks that were in 2.0 as well as brings several new syntactically good looking code generation

This guide just shows the major changes between version to get your application working on 2.1. You should see the What's New in 2.1 documentation to upgrade smaller parts of your code that are likely to be smaller quality of life improvements.

Masonite CLI

For 2.1 you will need masonite-cli>=2.1.0.

Make sure you run:

$ pip install masonite-cli --upgrade

Middleware

Middleware has been changed to classes so instead of doing this in your config/middleware.py file:

HTTP_MIDDLEWARE = [
    'app.http.middleware.DashboardMiddleware.DashboardMiddleware',
]

You will now import it directly:

import app.http.middleware.DashboardMiddleware import DashboardMiddleware

HTTP_MIDDLEWARE = [
    DashboardMiddleware,
]

Auto resolving parameters has been removed

This is likely the biggest change in 2.0. Before 2.1 you were able to fetch by key when resolving by doing something like:

def show(self, Request):
    Request.input(..)

We have removed this by default and now you much explicitly import your classes in order to interact with the container resolving:

from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.input(..)

If you truly do not like this change you can modify your container on a per project basis by adding this to your container constructor in wsgi.py:

container = App(resolve_parameters=True)

Just know this is not recommended and Masonite may or may not remove this feature entirely at some point in the future.

Resolving Mail, Queues and Broadcasts

Previously we were able to do something like this:

def show(self, Mail):
    Mail.to(..)

Since we never actually created a class from this and you were not able to explicitly resolve this, we utilized the new container swapping in order to swap a class out for this container binding.

All instances above should be changed to:

from masonite import Mail

def show(self, mail: Mail):
    mail.to(..)

Don't forgot to also do your boot methods on your Service Providers as well:

def boot(self, request: Request):
    ..request..

As well as all your middleware and custom code:

class AuthenticationMiddleware(object):
    """ Middleware To Check If The User Is Logged In """

    def __init__(self, request: Request):
        """ Inject Any Dependencies From The Service Container """
        self.request = request
    ...

Resolving your own code

You may have classes you binded personally to the container like this:

def slack_send(self, IntegrationManager):
    return IntegrationManager.driver('slack').scopes('incoming-webhook').state(self.request.param('id')).redirect()

To get this in line for 2.1 you will need to use Container Swapping in order to be able to resolve this. This is actually an awesome feature.

First go to your provider where you binded it to the container:

from app.managers import IntegrationManager

def boot(self):
    self.app.bind('IntegrationManager', IntegrationManager.driver('something'))

and add a container swap right below it by swapping it with a class:

from app.managers import IntegrationManager

def boot(self):
    self.app.bind('IntegrationManager', IntegrationManager.driver('somedriver'))

    self.app.swap(IntegrationManager, IntegrationManager.driver('somedriver'))

now you can use that class to resolve:

from app.managers import IntegrationManager

def slack_send(self, manager: IntegrationManager):
    return manager.driver('slack').scopes('incoming-webhook').state(self.request.param('id')).redirect()

Removed Masonite Facades

Completely removed the masonite.facades module and put the only class (the Auth class) in the masonite.auth module.

So all instances of:

from masonite.facades.Auth import Auth

need to be changed to:

from masonite.auth import Auth

Removed the StartResponseProvider

The StartResponseProvider was not doing anything crazy and it could be achieved with a simple middleware. This speeds up Masonite slightly by offsetting where the response preparing takes place.

Simply remove the StartResponseProvider from your PROVIDERS list:

PROVIDERS = [
    # Framework Providers
    AppProvider,
    SessionProvider,
    RouteProvider,
    StatusCodeProvider,
    # StartResponseProvider,
    WhitenoiseProvider,
    ViewProvider,
    HelpersProvider,

    ...

As well as put the new middleware in the HTTP middleware

from masonite.middleware import ResponseMiddleware
..

HTTP_MIDDLEWARE = [
    LoadUserMiddleware,
    CsrfMiddleware,
    HtmlMinifyMiddleware,
    ResponseMiddleware, # Here
]

JSON Payloads

In 2.0 you had to fetch incoming JSON payloads like this:

request.input('payload')['id']

So now all instances of the above can be used normally:

request.input('id')

Moved CSRF Middleware into core

CSRF middleware now lives in core and allows you to override some methods or interact with the middleware with class attributes:

Replace your current CSRF Middleware with this new one:

""" CSRF Middleware """

from masonite.middleware import CsrfMiddleware as Middleware


class CsrfMiddleware(Middleware):
    """ Verify CSRF Token Middleware """

    exempt = []

If you made changes to the middleware to prevent middleware from being ran on every request you can now set that as a class attribute:

""" CSRF Middleware """

from masonite.middleware import CsrfMiddleware as Middleware


class CsrfMiddleware(Middleware):
    """ Verify CSRF Token Middleware """

    exempt = []
    every_request = False

This also allows any security issues found with CSRF to be handled on all projects quickly instead of everyone having to patch their applications individually.

Added cwd imports to migrations and seeds

In migrations (and seeds) you will need to put this import inside a __init__.py file in order to allow models to be imported into them

import os
import sys
sys.path.append(os.getcwd())

Bootstrap File

There was a slight change in the bootstrap/start.py file around line 60.

This line:

 start_response(container.make('StatusCode'), container.make('Headers'))

Needs to be changed to:

start_response(
    container.make('Request').get_status_code(), 
    container.make('Request').get_and_reset_headers()
)

Response Binding

You no longer should bind directly to the Response key in the container. You should use the new Response object.

All instances of:

self.app.bind('Response', 'some value')

should now be:

response.view('some value')

and any instance of:

self.app.make('Response')

should be changed to:

response.data()

Restructuring some sample code would be changing this:

self.request.app().bind(
    'Response',
    htmlmin.minify(
        self.request.app().make('Response')
    )
)

to this:

self.response.view(
    htmlmin.minify(self.response.data())
)

Cache Exists name change

The Cache.cache_exists() has been changed to just Cache.exists(). You will need to make changes accordingly:

from masonite import Cache

def show(self, cache: Cache):

    # From
    cache.cache_exists('key')

    # To
    cache.exists('key')

That is all the main changes in 2.1. Go ahead and run your server and you should be good to go. For a more up to date list on small improvements that you can make in your application be sure to checkout the Whats New in 2.1 documentation article.

Environment Variables

Although not a critical upgrade, it would be a good idea to replace all instances of retrieval of environment variables with the new masonite.env function.

Change all instances of this:

import os
..

DRIVER = os.getenv('key', 'default')
..
KEY = os.envrion.get('key', 'default')

with the new env function:

from masonite import env
..

DRIVER = env('key', 'default')
..
KEY = env('key', 'default')

What this will do is actually type cast accordingly. If you pass a numeric value it will cast it to an int and if you want a boolean if will cast True, true, False, false to booleans like this:

if you don't want to cast the value you can set the cast parameter to False

KEY = env('key', 'default', cast=False)

Removed Store Prepend method

We removed the store_prepend() method on the upload drivers for the filename keyword arg on the store method.

So this:

upload.store_prepend('random-string', request.input('file'))

now becomes:

upload.store(request.input('file'), filename='random-string')

Masonite 2.1 to 2.2

Introduction

Welcome to the upgrade guide to get your Masonite 2.1 application working with Masonite 2.2. We'll be focusing on all the breaking changes so we can get all your code working on a Masonite 2.2 release cycle.

We will not go into all the better ways to use some of the features. For those changes be sure to read the "" documentation to the left to see what fits into your application and what doesn't. We will only focus on the breaking changes here.

Masonite 2.2 is jam packed with amazing new features and most of which are backwards compatible so upgrading from Masonite 2.1 to 2.2 is really simple.

We'll go through each section that your application will need to be upgraded and how it can be done.

Each upgrade will have an impact rating from LOW to HIGH. The lower the rating, the less likely it will be that your specific application needs the upgrade.

Getting Started

First let's upgrade Masonite to 2.2 first so we can see any exceptions that will be raised.

Let's upgrade by doing:

You can also add it to your requirements.txt or Pipfile.

Removing route helpers

Impact: MEDIUM

In Masonite 2.1, route helpers were deprecated and you likely started receiving deprecation warnings. In Masonite 2.2, these were removed. You may have had routes that looks like this:

You will now need to remove all these and use the class based ones. To make this easier we can just import the get and post helpers and alias them like this:

Changed Validation

Impact: MEDIUM

Masonite 2.2 completely removes the validation library that shipped with Masonite in favor of a brand new one that was built specifically for Masonite.

Validation Provider

You'll need to add a new validation provider if you want your application to have the new validation features.

Add it by importing it into config/providers.py and add it to your PROVIDERS list:

Replacing Validation Code

Masonite 2.2 completely removed the validation package from 2.1 and created an even better all new validation package. You'll have to remove all your validation classes and use the new validation package.

For example you may have had a validation class that looked like this:

and used it inside your views like this:

This is now completely changed to use a better and more sleeker validation. The above validation can now be written like this:

Auth class now auto resolves it's own request class

Masonite 2.2 changes a bit how the masonite.auth.Auth class resolves out of the container and how it resolves its own dependencies.

Now instead of doing something like:

You'll need to move this into the parameter list so it can be resolved:

There should be quite a bit of these in your application if you have used this class or you have used the built in craft auth scaffold command.

Resolving Classes

Impact: MEDIUM

The behavior for resolving classes has now been changed. If you bind a class into the container like this:

It previously would have resolved and gave back the class:

This will now resolve from the container when you resolve it as a parameter list. This means that you will never get back a class inside places like controllers.

Now the above code would look something like this:

notice it now returns an object. This is because Masonite will check before it resolves the class if the class itself needs to be resolved (if it is a class). If SomeClass requires the request object, it will be passed automatically when you resolve it.

Testing

Masonite 2.2 focused a lot on new testing aspects of Masonite and has some big rewrites of the package internally.

UnitTest class

The UnitTest class has been completely removed in favor of the new masonite.testing.TestCase method.

An import that looked like this:

Should now look like this:

Pytest VS Unittest

All classes have now been changed to unittest classes. This will still work with pytest and you can still run python -m pytest. The only thing that changes is the structure of the setup_method(). This has been renamed to setUp().

A class like this:

Should now look like this:

Method naming

Previously all methods were snake_case but to continue with the unittest convention, all testing methods are camelCase.

A method like:

Now becomes:

Again this is to prevent developers from needing to switch between snake_case and camelCase when using Masonite methods and unittest methods.

Route method

The route method that looked something like this:

Has now been replaced with the method name of the route. So to get a GET route you would do:

or a POST route:

So be sure to update all methods of self.route() with the correct request methods.

Loading Routes

In 2.1 you had to manually load your routes in like this:

this is no longer required and routes will be found automatically. There is no longer a self.routes() method.

JSON method

The JSON method signature has changed and you now should specify the request method as the first parameter.

A previous call that looked like this:

should become:

User

Previously you logged a user in by using the user method but now you can using the actingAs method before you call the route:

A method like this:

Should now be:

The Basics

Controllers

Introduction

Controllers are a vital part of Masonite and is mainly what differs it from other Python frameworks which all implement the MVC structure differently. Controllers are simply classes with methods. These methods take a self parameter which is the normal self that Python methods require. Controller methods can be looked at as "function based views" if you are coming from Django as they are simply methods inside a class and work in similar ways.

Controllers have an added benefit over straight function based views as the developer has access to a full class they can manipulate however they want. In other words, controller methods may utilize class attributes, private methods and class constructors to break up and abstract logic. They provide a lot of flexibility.

Creating a Controller

Its very easy to create a controller with Masonite with the help of our craft command tool. We can simply create a new file inside app/http/controllers, name the class the same name as the file and then create a class with methods. We can also use the craft controller command to do all of that for us which is:

When we run this command we now have a new class in app/http/controllers/DashboardController.py called DashboardController. By convention, Masonite expects that all controllers have their own file since it’s an extremely easy way to keep track of all your classes since the class name is the same name as the file. This is very opionated but you can obviously put this class wherever you like.

Notice that we passed in Dashboard but created a DashboardController. Masonite will always assume you want to append Controller to the end.

Exact Controllers

Remember that Masonite will automatically append Controller to the end of all controllers. If you want to create the exact name of the controller then you can pass a -e or --exact flag.

This will create a Dashboard controller located in app/http/controllers/Dashboard.py

Resource Controllers

Resource controllers are controllers that have basic CRUD / resource style methods to them such as create, update, show, store etc. We can create a resource controller by running:

this will create a controller that looks like:

Defining a Controller Method

Controller methods are very similar to function based views in a Django application. Our controller methods at a minimum should look like:

If you are new to Python, all controller methods must have the self parameter. The self parameter is the normal python self object which is just an instance of the current class as usual. Nothing special here.

Container Resolving

All controller methods and constructors are resolved by the container so you may also retrieve additional objects from the container by specifying them as a parameter in the method:

or by specifying them in the constructor:

If you need a class in multiple controller methods then it is recommended to put it into the constructor in order to keep the controller DRY.

It’s important to note that unlike other frameworks, we do not have to specify our route parameters as parameters in our controller method. We can retrieve the parameters using the request.param('key') class method.

Returning JSON

You can return JSON in a few different ways. The first way is returning a dictionary which will then be parsed to JSON:

you may return a list:

Or you may even return a model instance or collection. Take these 2 code snippets as an example:

Returning a paginated response directly will include the collection data, along with results metadata.

Query parameters accepted are: 'page_size' and 'page'. These will be handled directly as part of the response, there is no need to pass them in explicitly.

Orator classes LengthAwarePaginator and Paginator will return slightly different responses.

LengthAwarePaginator:

returns:

Paginator:

returns:

Passing Route Parameters

Optionally you can pass route parameters along with your resolving code. This is useful to keep a nice clean codebase.

For example, these two code snippets are the same:

And this:

You can specify parameters along with any other container resolving.

Helper Functions

Built in global helper functions were removed by default in v2.1 though they are not deprecated and you can use them as you wish.

Introduction

Masonite works on getting rid of all those mundane tasks that developers either dread writing or dread writing over and over again. Because of this, Masonite has several helper functions that allows you to quickly write the code you want to write without worrying about imports or retrieving things from the Service Container. Many things inside the Service Container are simply retrieved using several functions that Masonite sets as builtin functions which we call "Built in Helper Functions" which you may see them referred to as.

These functions do not require any imports and are simply just available which is similiar to the print() function. These functions are all set inside the HelpersProvider Service Provider.

You can continue to use these helper functions as much as you like but most developers use these to quickly mock things up and then come back to refactor later.

It may make more sense if we take a peak at this Service Provider:

Notice how we simply just add builtin functions via this provider.

Built In Helpers

The below list of helpers are "builtin" helpers meaning they are global in the same way that the print method is global. These helpers can be used without any imports.

Request

The Request class has a simple request() helper function.

is exactly the same as:

Notice we didn't import anything at the top of the file, nor did we inject anything from the Service Container.

View

The view() function is just a shortcut to the View class.

is exactly the same as:

Mail

Instead of resolving the mail class you can use the mail helper:

is exactly the same as:

Auth

The auth() function is a shortcut around getting the current user. We can retrieve the user like so:

is exactly the same as:

This will return None if there is no user so in a real world application this may look something like:

This is because you can't call the .id attribute on None

Container

We can get the container by using the container() function

is exactly the same as:

Env

We may need to get some environment variables inside our controller or other parts of our application. For this we can use the env() function.

is exactly the same as:

Resolve

We can resolve anything from the container by using this resolve() function.

is exactly the same as:

That's it! These are simply just functions that are added to Python's builtin functions.

Die and Dump

Die and dump is a common way to debug objects in PHP and other programming languages. Laravel has the concept of dd() which dies and dumps the object you need to inspect.

dd() is essentially adding a break point in your code which dumps the properties of an object to your browser.

For example we can die and dump the user we find:

If we then go to the browser and visit this URL as normal then we can now see the object fully inspected which will kill the script wherever it is in place and throw an exception but instead of showing the normal debugger it will use a custom exception handler and show the inspection of the object instead:

Non Built In Helpers

There are several helper methods that require you to import them in order to use them. These helpers are not global like the previous helpers.

Config

The config helper is used to get values in the config directory. For example in order to get the location in the config/storage.py file for example.

This function can be used to retrieve values from any configuration file but we will use the config/storage.py file as an example.

With a config/storage.py file like this:

We can get the value of the west key in the location inner dictionary like so:

Instead of importing the dictionary itself:

Note the use of the lowercase storage.drivers.s3 instead of storage.DRIVERS.s3. Either or would work because the config function is uppercase and lowercase insensitive.

Optional

This helper that allows you to wrap any object in this helper and call attributes or methods on it even if they don't exist. If they exist then it will return the method, if it doesn't exist it will return None.

Take this example where we would normally write:

We can now use this code snippet instead:

Compact

Compact is a really nice helper that allows you to stop making those really repetitive dictionary statements in your controller methods

take this for example:

Notice how our Python variables are exactly the same as what we want our variables to be in our template.

With the compact function, now you can do:

You can also pass in a dictionary which will update accordingly:

Collect

You can use the same Collection class that orator uses when returning model collections. This can be used like so:

You have access to all the methods on a normal collection object.

Requests

Learn more by reading the documentation.

Requests

Introduction

The Request class is initialized when the server first starts and is modified on every request. This means that the Request class acts as a singleton and is not reinitialized on every request. This presents both pros and cons during developing Masonite. It's great to not have to worry about a new object being instantiated every time but the con is that some attributes need to be reset at the end of the request.

The Request class is loaded into the IOC container first so any Service Provider will have access to it. The IOC container allows all parts of the framework to be resolved by the IOC container and auto inject any dependencies they need.

Read more about the IOC container in the documentation.

Getting Started

The Request class is bound into the IOC container once when the server is first started. This takes the WSGI environment variables generated by your WSGI server as a parameter. Because of this, we reload the WSGI values on every request but the actual Request object does not change. In other words, the memory address of the Request object is always the same but the class attributes will change of every request. This is done already for you by the Masonite framework itself. This Request class is bound and initialized inside the AppProvider Service Provider. We grab this request object by simply passing in Request into the parameters of anything resolved by the Service Container such as middleware, drivers and controller methods like so:

Masonite is smart enough to know that we need the Request class and it will inject it into our method for us.

Helper Function

Masonite ships with a HelpersProvider Service Provider which adds several helper functions. One of these helper functions is the request() function. This function will return the request object. Because of this, these two pieces of code are identical:

Notice we didn't import anything at the top of our file and also didn't retrieve any objects from the IOC container. Masonite helper functions act just like any other built in Python function.

Usage

The Request has several helper methods attached to it in order to interact with various aspects of the request.

In order to get the current request input variables such as the form data during a POST request or the query string during a GET request looks like:

There is no difference between any HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, etc) when it comes to getting input data. They are all retrieved through this .input() method so there is no need to make a distinction if the request is GET or POST

Method Options

Input Data

We can get all the request input variables such as input data from a form request or GET data from a query string. Note that it does not matter what HTTP method you are using, the input method will know what input data to get dependent on the current HTTP method (GET, POST, PUT, etc)

This will return all the available request input variables for that request as a dictionary.

This method will get all of the request input variables to include any internal framework variables completely handled internally such as __token and __method. You can exclude them by passing in False into the method or specifying it explicitly:

To get a specific input:

Input Cleaning

Input data will be cleaned of HTML tags and other security measures. This may cause unwanted return values if you are expecting something like a JSON string. If you want to opt to not clean the input you can specify that as a keyword argument:

To check if some request input data exists:

Getting Dictionary Input

If your input is a dictionary you have two choices how you want to access the dictionary. You can either access it normally:

Or you can use dot notation to fetch the value for simplicity:

You can also use a * wildcard to get all values from a dictionary list. Take this code example:

Only

You can only get a certain set of parameters if you have a need to do so. This can be used like:

Without

We can specify a set of parameters to exclude from the inputs returned. For example:

Notice it returned everything besides lastname.

URL Parameters

To get the request parameter retrieved from the url. This is used to get variables inside: /dashboard/@firstname for example.

JSON Payloads

Sometimes you may want to handle incoming JSON requests. This could be form external API's like Github.

Masonite will detect that an incoming request is a JSON request and put the cast the JSON to a dictionary and load it into the payload request input. For example if you have an incoming request of:

Then we can fetch this input in a controller using the normal input() method like so:

Cookies

You may also set a cookie in the browser. The below code will set a cookie named key to the value of value.

By default, all cookies are encrypted with your secret key which is generated in your .env file when you installed Masonite. This is a security measure to ensure malicious Javascript code cannot fetch cookies if they are somehow retrieved. All cookies are set with the HTTP_ONLY flag meaning that Javascript cannot read them although you can turn this off using a parameter.

Creating

Not Encrypting

If you choose to not encrypt your values and create cookies with the plain text value then you can pass a third value of True or False. You can also be more explicit if you like:

Expirations

All cookies are set as session cookies. This means that when the user closes out the browser completely, all cookies will be deleted.

This will set a cookie thats expires 5 minutes from the current time.

HttpOnly

Again, as a security measure, all cookies automatically are set with the HttpOnly flag which makes it unavailable to any Javascript code. You can turn this off:

This will now allow Javascript to read the cookie.

Reading

You can get all the cookies set from the browser

You can get a specific cookie set from the browser

Again, all cookies are encrypted by default so if you set a cookie with encryption then this method will decrypt the cookie. If you set a cookie in plain text then you should pass the False as the second parameter here to tell Masonite not to decrypt your plain text cookie value.:

This will return the plain text version of the cookie.

If Masonite attempts to decrypt a cookie but cannot then Masonite will assume that the secret key that encrypted it was changed or the cookie has been tampered with and will delete the cookie completely.

If your secret key has been compromised then you may change the key at anytime and all cookies set on your server will be removed.

Deleting

You may also delete a cookie. This will remove it from the browser.

User

You can also get the current user from the request. This requires the LoadUserMiddleware middleware which is in Masonite by default. This will return an instance of the current user.

Routes

You can also get a route URL via the route name. Let's say we have a route like this:

We can get the URL from the route name like so:

Route Parsing

if we have route parameters like this:

then we can pass in a dictionary:

You may also pass a list if that makes more sense to you:

This will inject that value for each parameter in order. For example if we have this route:

then we can use:

Contains

We can also check if a route contains a specific pattern:

You can also use this in a template and pass in a show parameter to return a string instead. This is useful if you want to show active status classes depending on the current route:

Current URL

We can get the current url with:

Redirection

You can specify a url to redirect to

If the url contains http than the route will redirect to the external website

You can redirect to a named route

You can also use the name parameter on the redirect method:

You can also redirect to a specific controller. This will find the URL that is attached to the controller method

Sometimes your routes may require parameters passed to it such as redirecting to a route that has a url like: /url/@firstname:string/@lastname:string.

Redirecting to a named route with URL parameters:

Redirecting to a url in your application with URL parameters:

Redirecting Back

There will be plenty of times you will need to redirect back to where the user came just came from. In order for this work we will need to specify where we need to go back to. We can use the back method for this.

Form Back Redirection

Masonite will check for a __back input and redirect to that route. We can specify one using the back() view helper function:

By default the back helper will return the current path so you can easily go back to the previous page after the form is submitted.

You can also specify a path to go back to:

Redirecting Back

After submitting the form you can redirect back to wherever the back template method was pointing to using the back() method:

This will also flash the current inputs to the session. You can then get the inputs using the {{ old('key') }} template helper:

Redirecting Back With Errors

You can redirect back with validation error message or redirect back with input value:

Redirecting Back With Inputs

When redirecting back there are times where you will also want to flash the inputs to the session. With this you can simply use the back() method but if you want a bit more control you can use the with_input() method.

You can then get the inputs using the {{ old('key') }} template helper:

Default Back URL

We can also specify a default route just in case a form submitted does not specify one using a form helper:

This will check for the __back input and if it doesn't exist it will use this default route. This is the same as a redirect if you don't use the back() helper.

Encryption Key

You can load a specific secret key into the request by using:

This will load a secret key into the request which will be used for encryptions purposes throughout your Masonite project.

Note that by default, the secret key is pulled from your configuration file so you do NOT need to supply a secret key, but the option is there if you need to change it for testing and development purposes.

Headers

You can also get and set any headers that the request has.

You can get all WSGI information by printing:

This will print the environment setup by the WSGI server. Use this for development purposes.

You can also get a specific header:

This will return whatever the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION header if one exists. If that does not exist then the AUTHORIZATION header will be returned. If that does not exist then None will be returned.

We can also set headers:

Masonite will automatically prepend a HTTP_ to the header being set for standards purposes so this will set the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION header. If you do not want the HTTP prefix then pass a third parameter:

This will set the AUTHORIZATION header instead of the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION header.

You can also set headers with a dictionary:

Status Codes

Masonite will set a status code of 404 Not Found at the beginning of every request. If the status code is not changed throughout the code, either through the developer or third party packages, as it passes through each Service Provider then the status code will continue to be 404 Not Found when the output is generated. You do not have to explicitly specify this as the framework itself handles status codes. If a route matches and your controller method is about to be hit then Masonite will set 200 OK and hit your route. This allows Masonite to specify a good status code but also allows you to change it again inside your controller method.

You could change this status code in either any of your controllers or even a third party package via a Service Provider.

For example, the Masonite Entry package sets certain status codes upon certain actions on an API endpoint. These can be 429 Too Many Requests or 201 Created. These status codes need to be set before the StartProvider is ran so if you have a third party package that sets status codes or headers, then they will need to be placed above this Service Provider in a project.

If you are not specifying status codes in a package and simple specifying them in a controller then you can do so freely without any caveats. You can set status codes like so:

You can also use an integer which will find the correct status code for you:

This snippet is exactly the same as the string based snippet above.

This will set the correct status code before the output is sent to the browser. You can look up a list of HTTP status codes from an online resource and specify any you need to. There are no limitations to which ones you can use.

Get Request Method Type

You can get the request method simply:

Changing Request Methods in Forms

Typically, forms only have support for GET and POST. You may want to change what HTTP method is used when submitting a form such as PATCH.

This will look like:

or you can optionally use a helper method:

When the form is submitted, it will process as a PUT request instead of a POST request.

This will allow this form to hit a route like this:

Validation

There is a convenient helper method you can use the validate the request. You can import the Validator class and use validation like so:

Routing

Introduction

Masonite Routing is an extremely simple but powerful routing system that at a minimum takes a url and a controller. Masonite will take this route and match it against the requested route and execute the controller on a match.

All routes are created inside routes/web.py and are contained in a ROUTES constant. All routes consist of some form of HTTP route classes (like Get() or Post()). At the bare minimum, a route will look like:

Most of your routes will consist of a structure like this. All URI’s should have a preceding /. Routes that should only be executed on Post requests (like a form submission) will look very similar:

Notice the controller here is a string. This is a great way to specify controllers as you do not have to import anything into your web.py file. All imports will be done in the backend. More on controllers later.

If you wish to not use string controllers and wish to instead import your controller then you can do so by specifying the controller as well as well as only passing a reference to the method. This will look like:

It’s important here to recognize that we didn't initialize the controller or the method, we did not actually call the method. This is so Masonite can pass parameters into the constructor and method when it executes the route, typically through auto resolving dependency injection.

Route Options

There are a few methods you can use to enhance your routes. Masonite typically uses a setters approach to building instead of a parameter approach so to add functionality, we can simply attach more methods.

HTTP Verbs

There are several HTTP verbs you can use for routes:

Route Groups

Some routes may be very similar. We may have a group of routes under the same domain, uses the same middleware or even start with the same prefixes. In these instances we should group our routes together so they are more DRY and maintainable.

We can add route groups like so:

This alone is great to group routes together that are similar but in addition to this we can add specific attributes to the entire group like adding middleware:

In the case you are only using one middleware:

The , at the end of 'auth' ensures that it's treated as a tuple and not as an array of strings.

In this instance we are adding these 2 middleware to all of the routes inside the group. We have access to a couple of different methods. Feel free to use some or all of these options:

The prefix parameter will prefix that URL to all routes in the group as well as the name parameter. The code above will create routes like /dashboard/url1 with the name of post.create. As well as adding the domain and middleware to the routes.

All of the options in a route group are named parameters so if you think adding a groups attribute at the end is weird you can specify them in the beginning and add the routes parameter:

Multiple Route Groups

Even more awesome is the ability to nest route groups:

This will go to each layer and generate a route list essentially from the inside out. For a real world example we refactor routes from this:

into this:

This will likely be the most common way to build routes for your application.

View Routes

You can also use View routes which is just a method on the normal route class:

You can use this view method with any route class.

Redirect Route

You can also redirect right from the routes list using a Redirect route class:

You do not have to specify the last 2 parameters. The default is a 302 response on GET methods.

Match Routes

You may have noticed above that we have a Match route class. This can match several incoming request methods. This is useful for matching a route with both PUT and PATCH.

The request methods are not case sensitive. They will be converted to uppercase on the backend. So ['Put', 'Patch'] will work just fine

Named Routes

We can name our routes so we can utilize these names later when or if we choose to redirect to them. We can specify a route name like so:

It is good convention to name your routes since route URI's can change but the name should always stay the same.

Route Middleware

Middleware is a great way to execute classes, tasks or actions either before or after requests. We can specify middleware specific to a route after we have registered it in our config/middleware.py file but we can go more in detail in the middleware documentation. To add route middleware we can use the middleware method like so:

This middleware will execute either before or after the route is executed depending on the middleware.

Deeper Module Controllers

All controllers are located in app/http/controllers but sometimes you may wish to put your controllers in different modules deeper inside the controllers directory. For example, you may wish to put all your product controllers in app/http/controllers/products or all of your dashboard controllers in app/http/controllers/users. In order to access these controllers in your routes we can simply specify the controller using our usual dot notation:

Global Controllers

Controllers are defaulted to the app/http/controllers directory but you may wish to completely change the directory for a certain route. We can use a forward slash in the beginning of the controller namespace:

This can enable us to use controllers in third party packages.

You can also import the class directly and reference the method you want to use:

Route Parameters

Very often you’ll need to specify parameters in your route in order to retrieve information from your URI. These parameters could be an id for the use in retrieving a certain model. Specifying route parameters in Masonite is very easy and simply looks like:

That’s it. This will create a dictionary inside the Request object which can be found inside our controllers.

In order to retrieve our parameters from the request we can use the param method on the Request object like so:

Optional Route Parameters

Sometimes you want to optionally match routes and route parameters. For example you may want to match /dashboard/user and /dashboard/user/settings to the same controller method. In this event you can use optional parameters which are simply replacing the @ with a ?:

You can also set default values if the route is not hit:

Route Compilers

Sometimes you will want to make sure that the route parameter is of a certain type. For example you may want to match a URI like /dashboard/1 but not /dashboard/joseph. In order to do this we simply need to pass a type to our parameter. If we do not specify a type then our parameter will default to matching all alphanumeric and underscore characters.

This will match all integers but not strings. So for example it will match /dashboard/10283 and not /dashboard/joseph

If we want to match all strings but not integers we can pass:

This will match /dashboard/joseph and not /dashboard/128372. Currently only the integer and string types are supported.

These are called "Route Compilers" because they compile the route differently depending on what is specified. If you specify :int or :integer it will compile to a different regex than if you specified :string.

Adding Route Compilers

We can add route compilers to our project by specifying them in a Service Provider.

Make sure you add them in a Service Provider where wsgi is False. We can add them on the Route class from the container using the compile method. A completed example might look something like this:

We just need to call the compile() method on the Route class and make sure we specify a regex string by preceding an r to the beginning of the string.

Your regex should be encapsulated in a group. If you are not familiar with regex, this basically just means that your regex pattern should be inside parenthesis like the example above.

Subdomain Routing

You may wish to only render routes if they are on a specific subdomain. For example you may want example.com/dashboard to route to a different controller than joseph.example.com/dashboard.

Out of the box this feature will not work and is turned off by default. We will need to add a call on the Request class in order to activate subdomains. We can do this in the boot method of one of our Service Providers that has wsgi=False:

To use subdomains we can use the .domain() method on our routes like so:

This route will match to joseph.example.com/dashboard but not to example.com/dashboard or test.example.com/dashboard.

It may be much more common to match any subdomain. For this we can pass in an asterisk instead.

This will match all subdomains such as test.example.com/dashboard, joseph.example.com/dashboard but not example.com/dashboard.

If a match is found, it will also add a subdomain parameter to the Request class. We can retrieve the current subdomain like so:

Static Files

Introduction

Masonite tries to make static files extremely easy and comes with whitenoise out of the box. Whitenoise wraps the WSGI application and listens for certain URI requests that can be resistered in your configuration files.

Configuration

All configurations that are specific to static files can be found in config/storage.py. In this file you'll find a constant file called STATICFILES which is simply a dictionary of directories as keys and aliases as the value.

The directories to include as keys is simply the location of your static file locations. For example, if your css files are in storage/assets/css then put that folder location as the key. For the value, put the alias you want to use in your templates. For this example, we will use css/ as the alias.

For this setup, our STATICFILES constant should look like:

Now in our templates we can use:

Which will get the storage/assets/css/style.css file.

Static Template Function

All templates have a static function that can be used to assist in getting locations of static files. You can specify the driver and locations you want using the driver name or dot notation.

Take this for example:

this will render:

You can also make the config location a dictionary and use dot notation:

and use the dot notation like so:

Serving "Root" Files

Sometimes you may need to serve files that are normally in the root of your application such as a robots.txt or manifest.json. These files can be aliased in your STATICFILES directory in config/storage.py. They do not have to be in the root of your project but instead could be in a storage/root or storage/public directory and aliased with a simple /.

For example a basic setup would have this as your directory:

and you can alias this in your STATICFILES constant:

You will now be able to access localhost:8000/robots.txt and you will have your robots.txt served correctly and it can be indexed by search engines properly.

Thats it! Static files are extremely simple. You are now a master at static files!

Views

Introduction

Views contain all the HTML that you’re application will use to render to the user. Unlike Django, views in Masonite are your HTML templates. All views are located inside the resources/templates directory.

All views are rendered with Jinja2 so we can use all the Jinja2 code you are used to. An example view looks like:

Creating Views

Since all views are located in resources/templates, we can use simply create all of our views manually here or use our craft command tool. To make a view just run:

This will create a template under resources/templates/hello.html.

Calling Views

The View class is loaded into the container so we can retrieve it in our controller methods like so:

This is exactly the same as using the helper function above. So if you choose to code more explicitly, the option is there for you.

Global Views

Some views may not reside in the resources/templates directory and may even reside in third party packages such as a dashboard package. We can locate these views by passing a / in front of our view.

For example as a use case we might pip install a package:

and then be directed or required to return one of their views:

This will look inside the dashboard.views package for a dashboard.html file and return that. You can obviously pass in data as usual.

Caveats

It's important to note that if you are building a third party package that integrates with Masonite that you place any .html files inside a Python package instead of directly inside a module. For example, you should place .html files inside a file structure that looks like:

ensuring there is a __init__.py file. This is a Jinja2 limitation that says that all templates should be located in packages.

Accessing a global view such as:

will perform an absolute import for your Masonite project. For example it will locate:

Or find the package in a completely separate third part module. So if you are making a package for Masonite then keep this in mind of where you should put your templates.

Passing Data to Views

Most of the time we’ll need to pass in data to our views. This data is passed in with a dictionary that contains a key which is the variable with the corresponding value. We can pass data to the function like so:

This will send a variable named id to the view which can then be rendered like:

View Syntax

Masonite also enables Jinja2 Line Statements by default which allows you to write syntax the normal way:

Or using line statements with the @ character:

The choice is yours on what you would like to use but keep in mind that line statements need to use only that line. Nothing can be after after or before the line.

Adding Environments

You can also add Jinja2 environments to the container which will be available for use in your views. This is typically done for third party packages such as Masonite Dashboard. You can extend views in a Service Provider in the boot method. Make sure the Service Provider has the wsgi attribute set to False. This way the specific Service Provider will not keep adding the environment on every request.

By default the environment will be added using the PackageLoader Jinja2 loader but you can explicitly set which loader you want to use:

The default loader of PackageLoader will work for most cases but if it doesn't work for your use case, you may need to change the Jinja2 loader type.

Using Dot Notation

If using a / doesn't seem as clean to you, you can also optionally use dots:

if you want to use a global view you still need to use the first /:

Helpers

There are quite a few built in helpers in your views. Here is an extensive list of all view helpers:

Request

You can get the request class:

Static

You can get the location of static assets:

If you have a configuration file like this:

this will render:

CSRF Field

You can create a CSRF token hidden field to be used with forms:

CSRF Token

You can get only the token that generates. This is useful for JS frontends where you need to pass a CSRF token to the backend for an AJAX call

Current User

You can also get the current authenticated user. This is the same as doing request.user().

Request Method

On forms you can typically only have either a GET or a POST because of the nature of html. With Masonite you can use a helper to submit forms with PUT or DELETE

This will now submit this form as a PUT request.

Route

You can get a route by it's name by using this method:

If your route contains variables you need to pass then you can supply a dictionary as the second argument.

or a list:

Another cool feature is that if the current route already contains the correct dictionary then you do not have to pass a second parameter. For example if you have a 2 routes like:

If you are accessing these 2 routes then the @id parameter will be stored on the user object. So instead of doing this:

You can just leave it out completely since the id key is already stored on the request object:

Back

This is useful for redirecting back to the previous page. If you supply this helper then the request.back() method will go to this endpoint. It's typically good to use this to go back to a page after a form is submitted with errors:

Now when a form is submitted and you want to send the user back then in your controller you just have to do:

Old

The request.back() method will also flash the current inputs to the session so you can get them when you land back on your template. You can get these values by using the old() method:

Session

You can access the session here:

Sign

You can sign things using your secret token:

Unsign

You can also unsign already signed string:

Encrypt

This is just an alias for sign

Decrypt

This is just an alias for unsign

Config

This allows you to easily fetch configuration values in your templates:

Optional

Allows you to fetch values from objects that may or may not be None. Instead of doing something like:

You can use this helper:

DD

This is the normal dd helper you use in your controllers

Hidden

You can use this helper to quickly add a hidden field

Exists

Check if a template exists

Gets a cookie:

Url

Get the URL to a location:

Jinja2

Below are some examples of the Jinja2 syntax which Masonite uses to build views.

Line Statements

It's important to note that Jinja2 statements can be rewritten with line statements and line statements are preferred in Masonite. In comparison to Jinja2 line statements evaluate the whole line, thus the name line statement.

So Jinja2 syntax looks like this:

This can be rewritten like this with line statement syntax:

It's important to note though that these are line statements. Meaning nothing else can be on the line when doing these. For example you CANNOT do this:

But you could achieve that with the regular formatting:

Whichever syntax you choose is up to you.

Variables

You can show variable text by using {{ }} characters: