Contributing Guide

Introduction

When contributing to this repository, please first discuss the change you wish to make via issue, email, or any other method with the owners or contributors of this repository before making a change.

Please note we have a code of conduct, please follow it in all your interactions with the project.

Getting Started

The framework has three main parts.

• This official MasoniteFramework/masonite repository is where most work will be done, primarily in the develop or release branches. This is the main repository that will install when creating new projects using the craft new command.

• The `MasoniteFramework/core repository where the main masonite pip package lives.

  • This is where the from masonite ... module lives.

• The MasoniteFramework/craft repository where the craft command lives

Getting this 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)

• 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 (change-default-orm) 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.

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 cli (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
...

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 ...

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()

Flagpole Comments

Flag pole comments are a fantastic way to give developers an inside to what is really happening and for now should only be reserved for configuration files. A flag pole comment gets its name from how the comment looks

'''
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| A Heading of The Setting Being Set
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| A quick description
|
'''

SETTING = 'some value'

It's important to note that there should have exactly 75 - above and below the header and have a trailing | at the bottom of the comment.

Pull Request Process

1. 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. 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.

2. Ensure any changes are well commented and any configuration files that are added have a flagpole comment on the variables it's setting.

3. 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.

4. You must add unit testing for any changes made. Of the three repositories listed above, only the cli and core repos require unit testing.

5. 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 SemVer for both core and cli or RomVer for the main Masontie repo.

6. The PR must pass the Travis CI build. The Pull Request can be merged in once you have a success review of two other collaborators, or the feature maintainer for your specific feature improvement or the repo owner.

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

Masonite is the rapid application Python development framework that strives for: beautiful and elegant syntax, actual batteries included with a lot of out of the box functionality, and extremely extendable. 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. Try it once and you’ll fall in love.

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.

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+

• Pip

Linux

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

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev

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

$ sudo apt-get install python3.6-dev

Installation

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

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

$ pip install masonite-cli

You may have to use sudo if you are on a UNIX machine

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

$ craft

This should show a list of command options. If it doesn't then try closing your terminal and reopening it or running it with sudo if you are on a UNIX machine. We are currently only interested in the craft new command. To create a new project just run:

$ craft new project_name
$ cd project_name

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.

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:

$ python -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

or if you are on Windows:

$ python -m venv venv
$ ./venv/Scripts/activate

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

$ craft install

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:

$ craft serve

Congratulations! You’ve setup your first Masonite project! Keep going to learn more about how to use Masonite to build your applications. You can learn more about craft by reading The Craft Command documentation.

Masonite is the rapid application Python development framework that strives for: beautiful and elegant syntax, actual batteries included with a lot of out of the box functionality, and extremely extendable. 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. Try it once and you’ll fall in love.

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.

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+

• Pip

Linux

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

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev

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

$ sudo apt-get install python3.6-dev

Installation

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

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

$ pip install masonite-cli

You may have to use sudo if you are on a UNIX machine

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

$ craft

This should show a list of command options. If it doesn't then try closing your terminal and reopening it or running it with sudo if you are on a UNIX machine. We are currently only interested in the craft new command. To create a new project just run:

$ craft new project_name
$ cd project_name

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.

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:

$ python -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

or if you are on Windows:

$ python -m venv venv
$ ./venv/Scripts/activate

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

$ craft install

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:

$ craft serve

Congratulations! You’ve setup your first Masonite project! Keep going to learn more about how to use Masonite to build your applications. You can learn more about craft by reading The Craft Command documentation.

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.FEATURE/BUGFIX.

This means that a framework version of 1.3.20 will have breaking changes with version 1.4.0.

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 and therefore will follow normal SemVer. 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.

Cycle

Masonite is currently on a 1 month major release cycle. This means that once every month will be a new 1.x release. This 1 month release cycle will continue until Masonite has reached a release that is stable enough to move far into the future with that releases architecture.

Once this stable release has been achieved, Masonite will move to a 6 month major release cycle with minor releases as often as every few days to as much as every few months.

Scheduled Releases

• v1.3 - February 2018

• v1.4 - March 2018

• v1.5 - April 2018

• v1.6 - May 2018

• v2.0 - June 2018

• v2.1 - December 2018

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 cli repository where the craft command tool is located.

Major 1 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.

Whenever the MasoniteFramework/cli 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.

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

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 either a Get() route or a Post() route. 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 initialized the controller but only passed a reference to the method and did not actually call the method. This is so Masonite can pass parameters into the method when it executes the route.

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.

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 url’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:

Change Controller Modules

Controllers are defaulted to the app/http/controllers directory but you may wish to completely change the directory for a certain route. We can change this by using the .module() method:

This will look for the controller in thirdparty.package.users module instead of the normal app.http.controllers module.

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:

Route Parameter Options

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.

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. To do this 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 to 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:

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 and the documentation.

If you are upgrading from Masonite 1.3 then please read the 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 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|safe }} 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 1.3

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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:

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

5. 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:

6. 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:

7. 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

8. 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:

9. 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:

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

10. Added Queues and Jobs

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 page and can be copied and pasted into your project. Take a look at the new file and the 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:

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|safe }} to it. For example:

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

Changes to Database Configuration

should now be:

with this change

Controllers

Introduction

Controllers are a vital part of Masonite and is mainly what differs it from other Python frameworks that implement the MVC structure differently. Controllers are simply classes with methods. These methods take a self parameter which is the normal self that Python class 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 function the exact same way.

Controllers have an added benefit over straight function based views as the developer has access to to a full class they can manipulate however they want but are also not limiting like Django's class based views. They provide a lot of flexibility.

Defining 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 under app/http/controllers/DashboardController 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 but you can obviously name this class wherever you like.

Defining a Controller Method

Controller methods are very similar to function based views in a Django application except this is just a normal class method. Our controller methods at a minimum should look like:

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.

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

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.

Static Files

Introduction

Masonite tries to make static files extremely easy and comes with whitenoise out of the box. White noise 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 they 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:

STATICFILES = {
    'storage/assets/css': 'css/',
}

Now in our templates we can use:

<img src="/css/style.css">

Which will get the storage/assets/css/style.css file.

Thats it! Static files are extremely simple. You are now a master at static files!

Requests

Introduction

The Request class is initialized when the server first starts and changes based on every request by the framework. The Request class is loaded into the IOC container 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 Service Container 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. This is done already for you by Masonite. 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:

def show(self, Request):
    # Request is the instance of the Request class
    pass

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:

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

def show(self):
    request().input('username')

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. Read more about helper functions in the Helper Functions documentation.

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:

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

NOTE: There is no difference between GET and POST when it comes to getting input data. They are both retrieved through this .input() method so there is no need to make a distinction if the request is GET or POST

Method Options

We can get all the request input variables such as input data from a POST form request or GET data from a query string. This will return all the available request input variables for that request as a dictionary.

def show(self, Request):
    return Request.all()

To check if some request input data exists:

def show(self, Request):
    return Request.has('variable')

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

def show(self, Request):
    return Request.param('firstname')

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.

def show(self, Request):
    return request.cookie('key', 'value')

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:

def show(self, Request):
    return request.cookie('key', 'value', encrypt=False)

You can get all the cookies set from the browser

def show(self, Request):
    return request.get_cookies()

You can get a specific cookie set from the browser

def show(self, Request):
    return Request.get_cookie('key')

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. If you do not do this then Masonite will throw an invalid token exception:

def show(self, Request):
    return Request.get_cookie('key', decrypt=False)

This will return the plain text version of the cookie.

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.

def show(self, Request):
    return Request.user()

You can specify a url to redirect to

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

If the url contains http than the route will redirect to the external website

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

You can redirect to a named route

def show(self, Request):
    return Request.redirectTo('dashboard')

You can also go back to a named route specified from the form input back. This will get the request input named back and redirect to that named route. This is great if you want to redirect the user to a login page and then back to where they came from. Just remember during your form submission that you need to supply a back input.

def show(self, Request):
    return Request.back()

This is equivalent to:

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

You can also specify the input parameter that contains the named route

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

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. For this you can use the send method. Currently this only works with named routes.

def show(self, Request):
    return Request.back().send({'firstname': 'Joseph', 'lastname': 'Mancuso'})

    return Request.redirectTo('dashboard').send({'firstname': 'Joseph', 'lastname': 'Mancuso'})

You can load a specific secret key into the request by using:

Request.key(key)

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

Request Lifecycle

Introduction

It's important to know the life cycle of the request so you can understand what is going on under the hood in order to write better software. Whenever you have a better understanding of how your development tools work, you will feel more confident as you'll understand what exactly is going on. This documentation will try to explain in as much detail as needed the flow of the request from initiation to execution. To read about how to use the Request class, read the Requests documentation.

Lifecycle Overview

First Things

All of Masonite is bootstrapped via Service Providers and is centralized via a Service Container. The Request class in binded into the container inside the AppProvider Service Provider which is inside the Masonite pip package. The Request class is initialized and registered into the container before the WSGI server starts. Because of this, the Request class is the same instance throughout the life of the server. In other words, the Request class is a singleton for the life of the WSGI server and is not re-instantiated on each request. On each request, the WSGI server will load the environ variable (the WSGI request details) into the request class which changes the behavior of requests accordingly such as what the URI is or what the request method type is.

Initialization

The request object is initialized in the AppProvider Service Provider and simply takes the environ variable as a dependency which is passed with all WSGI servers and hold information about the: request, server, URI, request method etc. The request object will then parse the environ and store them into certain class attributes. The request object has several methods that assist in extracting these attributes into usable and memorable methods. Read more about how to use the request object in the Requests documentation.

Requests in Middleware

If one of the middleware has instructed the request object to redirect, the view that is ready to execute, will not execute.

For example, if the user is planned on going to the dashboard view, but middleware has told the request to redirect to the login page instead then the dashboard view, and therefore the controller, will not execute at all. It will be skipped over. Masonite checks if the request is redirecting before executing a view.

Also, the request object can be injected into middleware by passing the Request parameter into the constructor like so:

class SomeMiddleware:

    def __init__(self, Request):
        self.request = Request

    ...

This will inject the Request class into the constructor when that middleware is executed. Read more about how middleware works in the Middleware documentation.

Requests in the API

Masonite comes with a built in API system for testing and personal development. It is not yet ready for production and lacks several authentication features.

The request object that is loaded in the API class will check the base URI and then execute CRUD operations based on the URI. As a developer, you are not responsible for manipulating the request object in your API classes.

Requests and Redirecting

Towards the end of the request lifecycle, Masonite will check if Masonite should redirect the user. This happens whenever the redirecting methods are exectuted on the request object. If the user wants to redirect to a named route, Masonite will loop through all the routes inside routes/web.py and check all the route names. If a name matches, it will execute that route. If the route requires parameters (such that a route has a @variable in the route URI) then you will need to pass the .send() method when redirecting. More about request redirecting in the Requests documentation.

If the user is redirecting to a normal URL, it will not check any routes. The request will then send a 302 response and redirect the user to the route specified.

Not Redirecting

If the request is not redirecting, then it will return a 200 status code response and simply show the output needed. This output will come from the controller.

Finally, the data returned from the controller is then passed into the return statement so the WSGI server can interpret it.

The Craft Command

Introduction

The craft command tool is a powerful developer tool that lets you quickly scaffold your project with models, controllers, views, commands, providers, etc. which will condense nearly everything down to it’s simplest form via the craft namespace. No more redundancy in your development time creating boilerplate code. Masonite condenses all common development tasks into a single namespace.

For example, In Django you may need to do something like:

$ django-admin startproject
$ python manage.py runserver
$ python manage.py migrate

The craft tool condenses all commonly used commands into its own namespace

$ craft new
$ craft serve
$ craft migrate

All scaffolding of Masonite can be done manually (manually creating a controller and importing the view function for example) but the craft command tool is used for speeding up development and cutting down on mundane development time.

Commands

The possible commands for craft include:

Creating an Authentication System

To create an authentication system with a login, register and a dashboard system, just run:

 $ craft auth

This command will create several new templates, controllers and routes so you don’t need to create an authentication system from scratch, although you can. If you need a custom authentication system, this command will scaffold the project for you so you can go into these new controllers and change them how you see fit.

These new controllers are not apart of the framework itself but now apart of your project. Do not look at editing these controllers as editing the framework source code.

Creating Controllers

If you wish to scaffold a controller, just run:

$ craft controller

This command will create a new controller under app/http/controller. By convention, all controllers should have an appended “Controller”. For example in order to make a dashboard controller, you should run craft controller DashboardController and not craft controller Dashboard although you can name your controllers however you like.

Creating a New Project

If you’d like to start a new project, you can run:

$ craft new project_name

This will download a zip file of the MasoniteFramework/masonite repository and unzip it into your current working directory. This command will default to the latest release of the repo.

You may also specify some options. The --version option will create a new project depending on the releases from the MasoniteFramework/masonite repository.

$ craft new project_name --version 1.3.0

Or you can specify the branch you would like to create a new project with:

$ craft new project_name --branch develop

After you have created a new project, you will have a requirements.txt file with all of the projects dependencies. In addition to this file, you will also have a .env-example file which contains a boiler plate of a .env file. In order to install the dependencies, as well as copy the example environment file to a .env file, just run:

$ craft install

The craft install command will also run craft key --store as well which generates a secret key and places it in the .env file.

Creating Migrations

All frameworks have a way to create migrations in order to manipulate database tables. Masonite uses a little bit of a different approach to migrations than other Python frameworks and makes the developer edit the migration file. This is the command to make a migration for an existing table:

$ craft migration name_of_migration —-table users

If you are creating a migration for a table that does not exist yet which the migration will create it, you can pass the --create flag like so:

$ craft migration name_of_migration --create users

These two flags will create slightly different types of migrations.

Migrating

After your migrations have been created, edited, and are ready for migrating, we can now migrate them into the database. To migrate all of your unmigrated migrations, just run:

$ craft migrate

You can also refresh and rollback all of your migrations and remigrate them. This will basically rebuild your entire database.

$ craft migrate:refresh

You can also rollback all migrations without remigrating

$ craft migrate:reset

Lastly, you can rollback just the last set of migrations you tried migrating

$ craft migrate:rollback

Models

If you'd like to create a model, you can run:

$ craft model ModelName

This will scaffold a model under app/ModelName and import everything needed.

If you need to create a model in a specific folder starting from the app folder, then just run:

$ craft model Models/ModelName

This will create a model in app/Models/ModelName.py.

Creating a Service Provider

Service Providers are a really powerful feature of Masonite. If you'd like to create your own service provider, just run:

$ craft provider DashboardProvider

This will create a file at app/providers/DashboardProvider.py

Read more about Service Providers under the Service Provider documentation.

Creating a Job

Jobs are used for Masonite's queue systems. You can create these Queueable classes and they will be able to be loaded into different queues. To create a job, run:

$ craft job JobName

This will create a job inside the app/jobs directory.

Creating Views

Views are simply html files located in resources/templates and can be created easily from running the command:

$ craft view blog

This command will create a template at resources/templates/blog.html

You can also create a view deeper inside the resources/templates directory.

$ craft view auth/home

This will create a view under resources/templates/auth/home.html but keep in mind that it will not create the directory for you. If the auth directory does not exist, this command will fail.

Creating Jobs

Jobs are designed to be loaded into queues. We can take time consuming tasks and throw them inside of a Job. We can then use this Job to push to a queue to speed up the performance of our application and prevent bottlenecks and slowdowns.

$ craft job SendWelcomeEmail

Jobs will be put inside the app/jobs directory. See the Queues and Jobs documentation for more information.

Packages

You may create a PyPi package with an added integrations.py file which is specific to Masonite. You can learn more about packages by reading the Creating Packages documentation. To create a package boilerplate, just run:

$ craft package name_of_package

Publishing

Packages that are built specifically for Masonite in mind will typically support publishing commands. Publishing commands are a way that packages can scaffold and integrate into Masonite. Publishing commands can allow third parties to: create or append to configuration files, create controllers, create routes and other integrations. Read more about publishing by reading our Publishing Packages documentation. To publish a package just run:

$ craft publish name_of_package

Running the WSGI Server

You can run the WSGI server by simply running:

$ craft serve

Encryption

Masonite comes with a way to encrypt data and by default, encrypts all cookies set by the framework. Masonite uses a key to encrypt and decrypt data. Read the Encryption documentation for more information on encryption.

To generate a secret key, we can run:

$ craft key

This will generate a 32 bit string which you can paste into your .env file under the KEY setting.

You may also pass the --store flag which will automatically add the key to your .env file:

$ craft key --store

This command is ran whenever you run craft install

Great! You are now a master at the craft command line tool.

Creating a Masonite Package

Introduction

Creating packages is very simple for Masonite. You can get a package created and on PyPi is less than 5 minutes. With Masonite packages you'll easily be able to integrate and scaffold all Masonite projects with ease. Masonite comes with several helper functions in order to create packages that can add configuration files, routes, controllers, views and commands.

Getting Started

As a developer, you will be responsible for both making packages and consuming packages. In this documentation we'll talk about both. We'll start by talking about how to make a package and then talk about how to use that package or other third party packages.

Masonite, being a Python framework, can obviously utilize all Python packages that aren’t designed for a specific framework. For example, Masonite can obviously use a library like requests but can’t use Django Rest Framework.

Similarly to how Django Rest Framework was built for Django, you can also build packages specific to Masonite.

About Packages

There are several key functions that Masonite uses in order to create applications. These include primarily: routes, controllers, views, and craft commands. Creating a package is simple and conveniently Masonite comes with several helper functions in order to create all of these. The developer using your package just needs to run craft publish your-package-name and your package can scaffold out their application for them.

You do not have to use this functionality and instead have the developer copy and paste things that they need but having great setup process is a great way to promote developer happiness.

Creating a Package

Like other parts of Masonite, in order to make a package, we can use a craft command. The craft package command will scaffold out a simple Masonite package and is fully able to be uploaded directly to PyPi.

This should be done in a separate folder outside of your project.

Let's create our package:

This will create a file structure like:

The integration.py file is important and should not be removed. This is the file that will be used when our users use the craft publish command.

If we open this file we'll notice a single boot() function. Whenever the user (the developer using Masonite) uses the craft publish testpackage command, craft will execute testpackage.integration.boot() so it's wise to load anything you want to be executed on in this function.

You'll notice a helper function imported for you at the top. This create_or_append_config() function does exactly what it says. It will take a config file from your package and put it into the project by either creating it (if it does not exist) or appending it (if it does exist). We'll talk about helper functions later on.

Creating a Config Package

Lets create a simple package that will add or append a config file from our package and into the project.

First lets create a config file inside testpackage/snippets/configs/services.py. We should now have a project structure like:

Great! inside the services.py lets put a configuration setting:

Perfect! Now we'll just need to tell PyPi to include this file when we upload it to PyPi. We can do this in our MANIFEST.in file.

Almost done. Now we just need to put our masonite.package helper function in our boot file. The location we put in our create_or_append_config() function should be an absolute path location to our package. To do this, Masonite has put a variable called package_directory inside our integrations.py file. Our boot method should look something like:

This will append the configuration file that has the same name as our package configuration file. In this case the configuration file we are creating or appending to is config/services.py because our packages configuration file is services.py. If we want to append to another configuration file we can simply change the name of our package configuration file.

Working With Our Package

We can either test our package locally or upload our package to PyPi.

To test our package locally, if you use virtual environments, just go to your Masonite project and activate your virtual environment. Navigate to the folder where you created your package and run:

If you want to be able to make changes without having to constantly reinstall your package then run

This will install your new package into your virtual environment. Go back to your project root so we can run our craft publish command. If we run craft publish testpackage we should get a module not found error.

It's important to note that craft publish does not have access to your virtual environment by default, only your system packages. What we can do is add our virtual environments site_packages directory to our config/packages.py config file which should look something like:

This will take that path and add it to the sys.path for the craft publish script.

Now if we run craft publish we should see that our new configuration file is now in config/services.py file. Awesome! We tried making package support super easy. You of course don't need to integrate directly or scaffold the project but the option is there if you choose to make a package to do so.

Uploading to PyPi

To upload to PyPi we just have to pick a great name for our package in the setup.py file. Now that you have a super awesome name, we'll just need to run:

which should upload our package with our credentials in our .pypirc file. Make sure you click the link above and see how to make once.

If python doesn’t default to Python 3 or if PyPi throws errors than you may need to run:

Consuming a package.

Now that your package is on PyPi we can just run:

Again, not all packages will need to be published. Only packages that need to scaffold the project. You will know if a package needs to be published by reading the packages install documentation.

Helper Functions

These helper functions are used inside the boot function and are only needed when you need your package to be published.

The location specified as parameters here are absolute path locations. You can achieve this by using the package_directory variable in your integration.py file.

To achieve an absolute path location, this will look like:

Functions

All helper functions are located in the masonite.packages module. To use these functions you’ll need to import the function to be used like:

create_or_append_config(location) will create a configuration file based on a configuration file from your package.

append_web_routes(location) will append web routes to the routes/web.py file. Your web routes should have a += to the ROUTES constant and should look something like:

append_api_routes(location) will append api routes to a masonite project under routes/api.py. Your api routes should have a += to the ROUTES constant and should look something like:

create_controller(location) will take a controller from your package and append it under the app.http.controllers namespace.

Publishing Packages

Introduction

Publishing packages are a great way for third party packages to integrate into Masonite. They are extremely easy to setup even on existing pip packages. Publishing packages allows any package to create configuration files, routes, controllers, and other integrations that make developing with your packages amazing. You can read about this in the documentation to learn more about how you can integrate your existing packages or future packages with Masonite.

NOTE: Virtual Environment

If you are in a virtual environment,craft publishwill not have access to your virtual environment dependencies. In order to fix this, we can add our site packages to ourconfig/packages.pyconfig file

If you attempt to publish your package without your virtual environment's site_packages file being inside config/packages.py, you will encounter a ModuleNotFound error that says it cannot find the integrations file located with the package you are trying to install. This is because Masonite does not have knowledge of your virtual environments dependencies, only your system dependencies.

If you are in a virtual environment then go to yourconfig/packages.pyfile and add your virtual environments site_packages folder to theSITE_PACKAGESlist. YourSITE_PACKAGESlist may look something like:

This will allowcraft publishto find our dependencies installed on our virtual environment. Read the documentation for more information.

Once done, all future packages that you pip install will be available through the publish command. This configuration should be done as soon as your virtual environment is created so you don't encounter any errors while trying to publish packages.

Creating Commands

Introduction

Creating a command is quite simple with Masonite and allows other developers to use your package in the command line similiar to a craft command by running craft-vendor. In this documentation we'll talk about how to create a package that can expand the craft tool by using craft-vendor which comes with the masonite-cli pip package.

Virtual Environments

It's important to note that craft-vendor does not have access to your virtual environment by default, only your system packages. What we can do is add our virtual environment's site_packages directory to our config/packages.py config file which should look something like:

This will take those paths and temporarily add it to the sys.path for the duration of the craft-vendor command.

Getting Started

The craft command comes with a package helper and can be used to create the boilerplate for Masonite packages. We can use this boilerplate to quickly create a package that can be used on the masonite command line. Lets create our boiler plate now by navigating to a directory we would like to build our package in and run:

This will create a file structure like:

You can ignore the integration file for now as we won't be using it in this tutorial. This integration file is used to scaffold other Masonite projects (like adding configuration files, controllers, routes etc.)

Commands module

All Masonite packages that would like users to interact with their package via the command line will need a commands module. Let's create one now and make our package structure look like:

Craft Vendor Commands

The craft-vendor command is separate from our normal craft command but is primarily for running third party package commands. This is apart of the masonite-cli package.

How the craft-vendor command works is there are three possible commands that can be ran after someone installs your package:

Running craft-vendor testpackage

This allows for some flexibility in how your commands can be ran. Lets start by explaining how the first command will interact with your package.

When the user runs this command, craft-vendor will look for a package called testpackage. Once it is found, it will look into the commands module and look for a file called testpackage, and then a function in that file called testpackage and execute that function. In this instance, we might have a structure like:

and then inside testpackage/commands/testpackage will look like:

Running craft-vendor testpackage payment

When the user runs this command, it will find the package called testpackage, look inside the commands module and for a file called payments.py and execute a function called payments. In this instance, we might have a structure like:

and then inside testpackage/commands/payments.py will look like:

Running craft-vendor testpackage payment stripe

Lastly, When the user runs this command, it will find the package called testpackage, look inside the commands module and for a file called payments.py and execute a function called stripe. In this instance, we might have a structure like:

and then inside testpackage/commands/payments.py will look like:

Uploading to PyPi

To upload to PyPi we just have to think of an awesome name for our package and put it in the setup.py file. Now that you have a super awesome name, we'll just need to run:

which should upload your package with your credentials from your .pypirc file. Make sure you click the link above and see how to make one.

Working With Our Package

We can either test our package locally or upload our package to PyPi.

To test our package locally, if you use virtual environments, just go to your Masonite project and activate your virtual environment. Navigate to the folder where you created your package via the command line and run:

If you want to be able to make changes without having to constantly reinstall your package then run

This will install your new package into your virtual environment. Go back to your project root so we can run our craft-vendor command. If we run craft-vendor testpackage we should see the respective print message. Try running all three commands and see the different print output. If you are getting an error of ModuleNotFound and you are inside a virtual environment, don't forget to add the site_packages directory to your config/packages.py by following the instructions at the top of this documentation.

Middleware

Introduction

Middleware is an extremely important aspect of web applications as it allows you to run important code either before or after every request or even before or after certain routes. In this documentation we'll talk about how middleware works, how to consume middleware and how to create your own middleware. Middleware is only ran when the route is found and a status code of 200 will be returned.

Getting Started

Middleware classes are placed inside the app/http/middleware by convention but can be placed anywhere you like. All middleware are just classes that contain a before method and/or an after method.

There are four types of middleware in total:

• Middleware ran before every request

• Middleware ran after every request

• Middleware ran before certain routes

• Middleware ran after certain routes

Creating Middleware

Again, middleware should live inside the app/http/middleware folder and should look something like:

If Masonite is running a “before” middleware, that is middleware that should be ran before the request, Masonite will check all middleware and look for a before method and execute that. The same for “after” middleware.

You may exclude either method if you do not wish for that middleware to run before or after.

This is a boilerplate for middleware. It's simply a class with a before and/or after method. Creating a middleware is that simple. Let's create a middleware that checks if the user is authenticated and redirect to the login page if they are not. Because we have access to the request object from the Service Container, we can do something like:

That's it! Now we just have to make sure our route picks this up. If we wanted this to execute after a request, we could use the exact same logic in the after method instead.

Since we are not utilizing the after method, we may exclude it all together. Masonite will check if the method exists before executing it.

Configuration

We have one of two configuration constants we need to work with. These constants both reside in our config/middleware.py file and are HTTP_MIDDLEWARE and ROUTE_MIDDLEWARE.

HTTP_MIDDLEWARE is a simple list which should contain an aggregation of your middleware classes. This constant is a list because all middleware will simply run in succession one after another, similar to Django middleware

Middleware is a string to the module location of your middleware class. If your class is located in app/http/middleware/DashboardMiddleware.py then the value we place in our middleware configuration will be a string: app.http.middleware.DashboardMiddleware.DashboardMiddleware. Masonite will locate the class and execute either the before method or the after method.

In our config/middleware.py file this type of middleware may look something like:

ROUTE_MIDDLEWARE is also simple but instead of a list, it is a dictionary with a custom name as the key and the middleware class as the value. This is so we can specify the middleware based on the key in our routes file.

In our config/middleware.py file this might look something like:

Consuming Middleware

Using middleware is also simple. If we put our middleware in the HTTP_MIDDLEWARE constant then we don't have to worry about it anymore. It will run on every successful request, that is when a route match is found from our web.py file.

If we are using a route middleware, we'll need to specify which route should execute the middleware. To specify which route we can just append a .middleware() method onto our routes. This will look something like:

This will execute the auth middleware only when the user visits the /dashboard url and as per our middleware will be redirected to the named route of login

Awesome! You’re now an expert at how middleware works with Masonite.

Service Container

Introduction

The Service Container is an extremely powerful feature of Masonite and should be used to the fullest extent possible. It's important to understand the concepts of the Service Container. It's a simple concept but is a bit magical if you don't understand what's going on under the hood.

Getting Started

The Service Container is just a dictionary where classes are loaded into it by key-value pairs, and then can be retrieved by either the key or value. That's it.

The container is contained inside the App class which is instantiated in the beginning of the framework and passed through various parts of the project such as controllers, middleware and drivers.

There are four methods that are important in interacting with the container: bind, make and resolve

Bind

In order to bind classes into the container, we will just need to use a simple bind method on our app container. In a service provider, that will look like:

This will load the key value pair in the providers dictionary in the container. The dictionary after this call will look like:

The service container is available in the Request object and can be retrieved by:

Make

In order to retrieve a class from the service container, we can simply use the make method.

That's it! This is useful as an IOC container which you can load a single class into the container and use that class everywhere throughout your project.

Resolve

This is the most useful part of the container. It is possible to retrieve objects from the container by simply passing them into the parameters. Certain aspects of Masonite are resolved such as controller methods, middleware and drivers.

For example, we can hint that we want to get the Request class and put it into our controller. All controller methods are resolved by the container.

In this example, before the show method is called, Masonite will look at the parameters and look inside the container for a key with the same name. In this example we are looking for Request so Masonite will look for a key inside the provider dictionary called Request and inject that value from the container into our method for us. Request is already loaded into the container for you out of the box.

Another way to resolve classes is by using Python 3 annotations:

Masonite will know that you are trying to get the Request class and will actually retrieve that class from the container. Masonite will search the container for a Request class regardless of what the key is in the container, retrieve it, and inject it into the controller method. Effectively creating an IOC container with dependency injection. Think of this as a get by value instead of a get by key like the earlier example.

Pretty powerful stuff, eh?

Resolving your own code

The service container can also be used outside of the flow of Masonite. Masonite takes in a function or class method, and resolves it's dependencies by finding them in the service container and injecting them for you.

Because of this, you can resolve any of your own classes or functions.

Remember not to call it and only reference the function. The Service Container needs to inject dependencies into the object so it requires a reference and not a callable.

This will fetch all of the parameters of randomFunction and retrieve them from the service container. There probably won't be many times you'll have to resolve your own code but the option is there.

Service Providers

Introduction

Service Providers are the key building blocks to Masonite. The only thing they do is register things into the Service Container, or retrieve things from the Service Container. You can read more about the Service Container in the documentation. If you look inside the config/application.py file, you will find a PROVIDERS list which contains all the Service Providers involved in building the framework.

You may create your own service provider and add it to your providers list to extend Masonite, or even remove some providers if you don't need their functionality. If you do create your own Service Provider, consider making it available on PyPi so others can install it into their framework.

Creating a Provider

We can create a Service Provider but simply using a craft command:

This will create a new Service Provider under our app/providers/DashboardProvider.py. This new Service Provider will have two simple methods, a register method and a boot method. We'll explain both in detail.

Service Provider Execution

There are a few architectural examples we will walk through to get you familiar with how Service Providers work under the hood. Let's look at a simple provider and walk through it.

We can see that we have a simple provider that registers the User model into the container. There are three key features we have to go into detail here.

WSGI

First, the wsgi = False just tells Masonite that this specific provider does not need the WSGI server to be running. When the WSGI server first starts, it will execute all service providers that have wsgi set to False. Whenever a provider only binds things into the container and we don't need things like requests or routes, then consider setting wsgi to False. the ServiceProvider class we inherited from sets wsgi to True by default. Whenever wsgi is True then the service provider will fire on every request.

Register

In our register method, it's important that we only bind things into the container. When the server is booted, Masonite will execute all register methods on all service providers. This is so the boot method will have access to the entire container.

Boot

The boot method will have access to everything that is registered in the container and is actually resolved by the container. Because of this, we can actually rewrite our provider above as this:

This will be exactly the same as above. Notice that the boot method is resolved by the container.

Great! It's really that simple. Just this knowledge will take you a long way. Take a look at the other service providers to get some inspiration on how you should create yours. Again, if you do create a Service Provider, consider making it available on PyPi so others can install it into their framework.

Validation

Introduction

Very often you will find a need to validate forms after you have submitted them. Masonite comes with a very simple and reusable way to validate input data with the Masonite Validator() class. In this documentation, we'll talk about how you can create your own validator to use within your project. Masonite uses the validator.py library for this feature.

Getting Started

The best way to create a reusable validator class within your Masonite project is to create a class and inherit from the Validator class inside the masonite.validator module.

We can make a class called RegistrationValidator(), inherit from masonite.validator.Validator() and put it inside app/validators/RegistrationValidator.py like so:

Awesome! By inheriting from Validator, this will add several key methods to our validator class that we'll need to verify our request input which we'll talk about below.

Starting Our Validations

Since we inherited from Validator, we have access to a validate() method which we can call with self.validate(). Inside this method call, we can use some useful attributes in order to check our request data.

An example of a simple validation will look something like:

Custom Error Messages

By default, Masonite will supply you with a dictionary of errors depending on the validator class. More information on what the default error messages are found below.

Although this is very convenient, you may wish to specify your own error messages. To do so, we can call the self.messages() method after we validate. This will look like:

This will change the default error messages to the defaults provided. If you do not specify a custom error message for a validation field then the default one will display as usual.

Requests

In order to check the input data we receive from a request, such as a form submission, we can use this validator like so:

Notice that we pass in the request inside the constructor of our RequestValidator class. Our class is using the constructor inherited from Masonite's Validator class.

Non Requests

Sometimes we may wish to use our validator class without request data. In order to do this we can just pass a dictionary of values into our .check() method like so:

Notice how we passed a dictionary into our .check() method here and didn't pass the request object in the constructor.

Validator Options

There are a plethora of options that you can use to validate your forms. In addition to validating your request input, we also get a dictionary of errors. In order to get the errors if a validation fails, we can get use the method:

This method will return a dictionary of errors that will be different depending on the validation class used but this method will return None if there are no errors. Below each option will be what the value of .errors() will be as well as how you would use them inside Masonite.

Required

By default, all keys registered for validation are optional. Any key that doesn't exist in the validation will skip any of the missing input data. For example, if a validation is not set for password then it will simply not check any validation on that specific request input. In this case, we can leave our password validation out entirely.

Unlike other validator classes, this class does not need to be instantiated (contain parenthesis at the end). So Required is the correct usage and not Required().

Usage

Error

Truthy

The Truthy() validator class will check whatever is truthy to Python. This includes True, non-0 integers, non-empty lists, and strings

Usage

Error

Equals

This validator will check that a value is equal to the value given.

Usage

Error

Note that all request input data will be a string. so make sure you use Equals('1') and not Equals(1). Just be sure to maintain the data type in your validation.

Range

This validator checks that the dictionary value falls inclusively between the start and end values passed to it.

Error

Pattern

The Pattern validator checks that the dictionary value matches the regex pattern that was passed to it.

Usage

Error

Since Orator returns a collection, we can specify an Orator Collection as well:

Error

Not

This validator negates a validator that is passed to it and checks the dictionary value against that negated validator.

Usage

Error

InstanceOf

This validator checks that the dictionary value is an instance of the base class passed to it, or an instance of one of its subclasses.

Usage

Error

SubclassOf

This validator checks that the dictionary value inherits from the base class passed to it. To be clear, this means that the dictionary value is expected to be a class, not an instance of a class.

Usage

Error

Length

This validator checks that value the must have at least minimum elements and optionally at most maximum elements.

Usage

Error

View Composers and Sharing

Introduction

Very often you will find yourself adding the same variables to a view again and again. This might look something like

This can quickly become annoying and it can be much easier if you can just have a variable available in all your templates. For this, we can "share" a variable with all our templates with the View class.

The View class is loaded into our container under the ViewClass alias. It's important to note that the ViewClass alias from the container points to the class itself and the View from the container points to the View.render method. By looking at the ViewProvider this will make more sense:

As you can see, we bind the view class itself to ViewClass and the render method to the View alias.

View Sharing

We can share variables with all templates by simply specifying them in the .share() method like so:

The best place to put this is in a new Service Provider. Let's create one now called ViewComposer.

This will create a new Service Provider under app/providers/ViewComposer.py and should look like this:

We also don't need it to run on every request so we can set wsgi to False. Doing this will only run this provider when the server first boots up. This will minimize the overhead needed on every request:

Great!

Since we need the request, we can throw it in the boot method which has access to everything registered into the service container, including the Request class.

Lastly we need to load this into our PROVIDERS list inside our config/application.py file.

And we're done! When you next start your server, the request variable will be available on all templates.

View Composing

In addition to sharing these variables with all templates, we can also specify only certain templates. All steps will be exactly the same but instead of the .share() method, we can use the .compose() method:

Now anytime the dashboard template is accessed (the one at resources/templates/dashboard.html) the request variable will be available.

We can also specify several templates which will do the same as above but this time with the resources/templates/dashboard.html template AND the resources/templates/dashboard/user.html template:

Lastly, we can compose a dictionary for all templates:

Note that this has exactly the same behavior as ViewClass.share()

Mail

Introduction

Masonite comes with email support out of the box. Most applications will need to send email upon actions like account creation or notifications. Because email is used so often with software applications, masonite provides mail support with several drivers.

Getting Started

All mail configuration is inside config/mail.py and contains several well documented options. There are several built in drivers you can use but you can make your own if you'd like. You can follow the documentation here at . If you do make your own, consider making it available on PyPi so others can install it. We may even put it in Masonite by default.

By default, Masonite uses the smtp driver. Inside your .env file, just put your smtp credentials. If you are using Mailgun then switch your driver to mailgun and put your Mailgun credentials in your .env file.

Configuring Drivers

There are two drivers out of the box that masonite uses and there is a tiny bit of configuration for both.

SMTP Driver

The SMTP driver takes several configuration files we can all put in our .env file.

Because this is SMTP, we can utilize all SMTP services such as mailtrap and gmail.

Thats it! As long as the authentication works, we can send emails. Remember that it is save to put sensitive data in your .env file because it is not committed to source control and it is inside the .gitignore file by default.

Mailgun Driver

Mailgun does not use SMTP and instead uses API calls to their service to send emails. Mailgun only requires 2 configuration settings:

as well as changing the DRIVER inside config/mail.py

Masonite will retrieve the configuration settings for the mailgun driver from the DRIVERS configuration setting which Masonite has by default, you do not have to change this.

Sending an Email

The Mail class is loaded into the container via the the MailProvider Service Provider. We can fetch this Mail class via our controller methods:

We can send an email like so:

All mail drivers are managed by the MailManager class and bootstrapped with the MailProvider Service Provider. Let's take a look at that:

We can specify which driver we want to use. Although Masonite will use the DRIVER variable in our mail config file by default, we can change the driver on the fly.

You can see in our MailProvider Service Provider that we can use the MailManager class to set the driver. We can use this same class to change the driver:

Queues

Sending an email may take several seconds so it might be a good idea to create a Job. Jobs are simply Python classes that inherit from the Queueable class and can be pushed to queues or ran asynchronously. This will look something like:

Instead of taking seconds to send an email, this will seem immediate and be sent using whatever queue driver is set. The async driver is set by default which requires no additional configuration and simply sends jobs into a new thread to be ran in the background.

Read more about creating Jobs and sending emails asynchronously in the "Queues and Jobs" documentation.

Methods

We can specify which driver we want to use. Although Masonite will use the DRIVER variable in our config file, we can change the driver on the fly.

We can also specify the subject:

You can specify which address you want the email to appear from:

Templates

If you don't want to pass a string as the message, you can pass a view template.

This will render the view into a message body and send the email as html. Notice that we didn't pass anything into the send message

Uploading

Introduction

Very often you will need to upload user images such as a profile image. Masonite let's you handle this very elegantly and allows you to upload to both the disk, and Amazon S3 out of the box. The UploadProvider Service Provider is what adds this functionality. Out of the box Masonite supports the disk driver which uploads directly to your file system and the s3 driver which uploads directly to your Amazon S3 bucket.

You may build more drivers if you wish to expand Masonite's capabilities. If you do create your driver, consider making it available on PyPi so others may install it into their project.

Read the "Creating an Email Driver" for more information on how to create drivers. Also look at the drivers directory inside the MasoniteFramework/core repository.

Configuration

All uploading configuration settings are inside config/storage.py. The settings that pertain to file uploading are just the DRIVER and the DRIVERS settings.

Driver and DRIVERS Settings

This setting looks like:

This defaults to the disk driver. The disk driver will upload directly onto the file system. This driver simply needs one setting which is the location setting which we can put in the DRIVERS dictionary:

This will upload all images to the storage/uploads directory. If you change this directory, make sure the directory exists as Masonite will not create one for you before uploading. Know that the dictionary inside the DRIVERS dictionary should pertain to the DRIVER you set. For example, to set the DRIVER to s3 it will look like this:

Some deployment platforms are Ephemeral. This means that either hourly or daily, they will completely clean their file systems which will lead to the deleting of anything you put on the file system after you deployed it. In other words, any user uploads will be wiped. To get around this, you'll need to upload your images to Amazon S3 or other asset hosting services which is why Masonite comes with Amazon S3 capability out of the box.

Uploading

Uploading with masonite is extremely simple. We can use the Upload class which is loaded into the container via the UploadProvider Service Provider. Whenever a file is uploaded, we can retrieve it using the normal Request.input() method. This will look something like:

And inside our controller we can do:

That's it! We specified the driver we want to use and just uploaded an image to our file system.

This action will return the file system location. We could use that to input into our database if we want:

We may also need to get the filename of the upload. If the request input is a file upload, we have some additional attributes we can use:

Lastly, we may need to prepend the file name with something like a uuid or something or even just a normal string. We can do so by using the storePrepend() method:

Uploading to S3

Uploading to S3 is exactly the same. Simply add your username, secret key and bucket to the S3 setting:

Make sure that your user has the permission for uploading to your S3 bucket.

Then in our controller:

How the S3 driver currently works is it uploads to your file system using the disk driver, and then uploads that file to your Amazon S3 bucket. So do not get rid of the disk setting in the DRIVERS dictionary.

Creating a Mail Driver

Introduction

Because of Masonite's Service Container, It is extremely easy to make drivers that can be used by simply adding your service provider.

Getting Started

Masonite comes shipped with a Service Provider called MailProvider which loads a few classes into the container as well as boots the default mail driver using the MailManager. This manager class will fetch drivers from the container and instantiate them. We can look at the MailProvider class which will gives us a better explanation as to what's going on:

We can see here that because we are only binding things into the container and we don't need the WSGI server to be running, we set wsgi = False. Service Providers that set wsgi to False will only run when the server starts and not on every request.

We can see here that we are binding a few drivers into the container and then binding the MailManager on boot. Remember that our boot method has access to everything that has been registered into the container. The register methods are executed on all providers before the boot methods are executed.

Mail Manager

The MailManager here is important to understand. When the MailManager is instantiated, it accepts the container as a parameter. When the MailManager is instantiated, it fires a create_driver method which will grab the driver from the configuration file and retrieve a MailXDriver from the container. The create_driver method is a very simple method:

Notice that when the driver is created, it tries to get a Mail{0}Driver from the container. Therefore, all we need to do is register a MailXDriver into the container ('X' being the name of the driver) and Masonite will know to grab that driver.

Creating a Driver

So now we know that we need a MailXDriver so let's walk through how we could create a maildrill email driver.

We can simply create a class which can become our driver. We do not need to inherit anything, although Masonite comes with a BaseMailDriver to get you started faster and all drivers should inherit from it for consistency reasons. You can make your driver from a normal class object but it will be harder and won't be considered in Pull Requests.

Let's create a class anywhere we like and inherit from BaseMailDriver:

Great! We are almost done. We just have to implement one method on this class and that's the send method. All other methods like to and template are inherited from the BaseMailDriver class. You can find out how to send an email using Maildrill and implement it in this send method.

We can look at other drivers for inspiration but let's look at the MailMailgunDriver class now:

If you are wondering where the self.message_body and self.config are coming from, check the BaseMailDriver. All driver constructors are resolved by the service container so you can grab anything you need from the container to make your driver work. Notice here that we don't need a constructor because we inherited it from the BaseMailDriver

Registering Your Mail Driver

Our AppProvider class might look something like this:

Great! Our new driver is registered into the container. It is now able to be created with Masonite's MailManager class. We can retrieve your new driver by doing:

Configuration

If we want the MailManager to use our new driver by default, change the DRIVER in our config/mail.py file. In addition, you may have the users of your driver require a special dictionary entry to the DRIVERS dictionary:

This way, users can easily swap drivers by simply changing the driver in the config file.

That's it! We just extended our Masonite project and created a new driver. Consider making it available on PyPi so others can install it!

Authentication

Introduction

Masonite comes with some authentication out of the box but leaves it up to the developer to implement. Everything is already configured for you by default. The default authentication model is the app/User model but you can change this in the config/auth.py configuration file.

Configuration

There is only a single config/auth.py configuration file which you can use to set the authentication behavior of your Masonite project. If you wish to change the authentication model, to a app/Company model for example, feel free to do in this configuration file.

Authentication Model

Again the default authentication model is the app/User model which out of the box comes with a __auth__ class attribute. This attribute should be set to the column that you want to authenticate with. By default your app/User model will default to the email column but if you wish to change this to another column such as name, you can do so here. This will lead your model to look like:

All models that should be authenticated in addition to specifying a __auth__ attribute also needs to have a password field as well in order to use the out of the box authentication that comes with Masonite.

Authenticating a Model

If you want to authenticate a model, you can use the Auth facade that ships with Masonite. This is simply a class that is used to authenticate models with a .login() method.

In order to authenticate a model this will look like:

This will find a model with the supplied username, check if the password matches using bcrypt and return the model. If it is not found or the password does not match, it will return False.

Again all authenticating models need to have a password column. The column being used to authenticate, such as a username or email field can be specified in the model using the __auth__ class attribute.

Changing The Authentication Column

You may change the column to be authenticated by simply changing the column value of the __auth__ class attribute. This will look something like:

This will look inside the email column now and check that column and password. The authentication column is email by default.

Creating an Authentication System

You may of course feel free to roll your own authentication system if you so choose but Masonite comes with one out of the box but left out by default. In order to scaffold this authentication system you can of course use a craft command:

This will create some controllers, views and routes for you. This command should be used primarily on fresh installs of Masonite but as long as the controllers do not have the same names as the controllers being scaffolded, you will not have any issues.

The views scaffolded will be located under resources/templates/auth.

After you have ran the craft auth command, just run the server and navigate to http://localhost:8000/login and you will now have a login, registration and dashboard. Pretty cool, huh?

Retrieving the Authenticated User

Masonite ships with a LoadUser middleware that will load the user into the request if they are authenticated. Masonite uses the token cookie in order to retrieve the user using the remember_tokencolumn in the table.

Using this LoadUser middleware you can retrieve the current user using:

If you wish not to use middleware to load the user into the request you can get the request by again using the Auth class

Checking if the User is Authenticated

If you would like to simply check if the user is authenticated, Request.user() or Auth(Request).user() will return False if the user is not authenticated. This will look like:

Protecting Routes

Masonite ships with an authentication middleware. You can use this middleware as a route middleware to protect certain routes from non authenticated users. This is great for redirecting users to a login page if they attempt to go to their dashboard.

You can use this middleware in your routes file like so:

By default this will redirect to the route named login. If you wish to redirect the user to another route or to a different URI, you can edit the middleware in app/http/middleware/AuthenticationMiddleware.py

Logging Out a User

If you wish to end the session for the user and log them out, you can do so by using the Auth class. This looks like:

This will delete the cookie that was set when logging in. This will not redirect the user to where they need to go. A complete logout view might look like:

Great! You’ve mastered how Masonite uses authentication. Remember that this is just out of the box functionality and you can create a completely different authentication system but this will suffice for most applications.