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 through resolving objects. That's it.

Think of "resolving objects" as Masonite saying "what does your object need? Ok, I have them in this dictionary, let me get them for you."

The container holds all of the frameworks classes and features so adding features to Masonite only entails adding classes into the container to be used by the developer later on. This typically means "registering" these classes into the container (more about this later on).

This allows Masonite to be extremely modular.

There are a few objects that are resolved by the container by default. These include your controller methods (which are the most common and you have probably used them so far) driver and middleware constructors and any other classes that are specified in the documentation.

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:

from masonite.provider import ServiceProvider
from app.User import User
from masonite.request import Request

class UserModelProvider(ServiceProvider):

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

    def boot(self):
        pass

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

>>> app.providers
{'User': <class app.User.User>}

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

def show(self, Request):
    Request.app() # will return the service container

Make

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

>>> from app.User import User
>>> app.bind('User', User)
>>> app.make('User')
<class app.User.User>

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.

Collecting

You may want to collect specific kinds of objects from the container based on the key. For example we may want all objects that start with "Exception" and end with "Hook" or want all keys that end with "ExceptionHook" if we are building an exception handler.

Collect By Key

We can easily collect all objects based on a key:

app.collect('*ExceptionHook')

This will return a dictionary of all objects that are binded to the container that start with anything and end with "ExceptionHook" such as "SentryExceptionHook" or "AwesomeExceptionHook".

We can also do the opposite and collect everything that starts with a specific key:

app.collect('Sentry*')

This will collect all keys that start with "Sentry" such as "SentryWebhook" or "SentryExceptionHandler."

Lastly, we may want to collect things that start with "Sentry" and end with "Hook"

app.collect('Sentry*Hook')

This will get keys like "SentryExceptionHook" and "SentryHandlerHook"

Collecting By Object

You can also collect all subclasses of an object. You may use this if you want to collect all instances of a specific class from the container:

from cleo import Command
...
app.collect(Command)
# Returns {'FirstCommand': <class ...>, 'AnotherCommand': ...}

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.

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

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:

from masonite.request import Request

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

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.

You can pass in keys and annotations in any order:

from masonite.request import Request

def show(self, Upload, request_class: Request, Broadcast):
    Upload.store(...)
    request_class.user()
    Broadcast.channel(...)

Pretty powerful stuff, eh?

Resolving Instances

Another powerful feature of the container is it can actually return instances of classes you annotate. For example, all Upload drivers inherit from the UploadContract which simply acts as an interface for all Upload drivers. Many programming paradigms say that developers should code to an interface instead of an implementation so Masonite allows instances of classes to be returned for this specific use case.

Take this example:

from masonite.contracts import UploadContract

def show(self, upload: UploadContract)
    upload # <class masonite.drivers.UploadDiskDriver>

Notice that we passed in a contract instead of the upload class. Masonite went into the container and fetched a class with the instance of the contract.

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.

from masonite.request import Request

def randomFunction(User):
    print(User)

def show(self, Request):
    Request.app().resolve(randomFunction) # Will print the User object

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.

Container Hooks

Sometimes we might want to run some code when things happen inside our container. For example we might want to run some arbitrary function about we resolve the Request object from the container or we might want to bind some values to a View class anytime we bind a Response to the container. This is excellent for testing purposes if we want to bind a user object to the request whenever it is resolved.

We have three options: on_bind, on_make, on_resolve. All we need for the first option is the key or object we want to bind the hook to, and the second option will be a function that takes two arguments. The first argument is the object in question and the second argument is the whole container.

The code might look something like this:

from masonite.request import Request

def attribute_on_make(request_obj, container):
    request_obj.attribute = 'some value'

...

container = App()

# sets the hook
container.on_make('Request', attribute_on_make)
container.bind('Request', Request)

# runs the attribute_on_make function
request = container.make('Request')
request.attribute # 'some value'

Notice that we create a function that accepts two values, the object we are dealing with and the container. Then whenever we run on_make, the function is ran.

We can also bind to specific objects instead of keys:

from masonite.request import Request

...

# sets the hook
container.on_make(Request, attribute_on_make)
container.bind('Request', Request)

# runs the attribute_on_make function
request = container.make('Request')
request.attribute # 'some value'

This then calls the same attribute but anytime the Request object itself is made from the container. Notice everything is the same except line 6 where we are using an object instead of a string.

We can do the same thing with the other options:

container.on_bind(Request, attribute_on_make)
container.on_make(Request, attribute_on_make)
container.on_resolve(Request, attribute_on_make)

Strict and Overriding

By default, Masonite will not care if you override objects from the container. In other words you can do this:

app.bind('number', 1)
app.bind('number', 2)

Without issue. Notice we are binding twice to the same key. You can change this behavior by specifying 2 values in the constructor of the App class:

container = App(strict=True, override=False)

Override

If override is False, it will not override values in the container. It will simply ignore them if you are trying to bind twice to the same key. If override is True, which it is by default, you will be allowed to override keys in the container with new values by binding them.

Strict

Strict will throw an exception if you try binding a key to the container. So with override being False it simply ignored binding a key to the container that already exists, setting strict to True will actually throw an exception.