Introduction

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 its 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

When craft is used outside of masonite directory, it will only show a few commands such as the new and install commands. Other commands such as commands for creating controllers or models are loaded in from the Masonite project itself.

Many commands are loaded into the framework itself and fetched when craft is ran in a Masonite project directory. This allows version specific Masonite commands to be efficiently handled on each subsequent version as well as third party commands to be loaded in which expands craft itself.

The possible commands for craft include:

Tinker Command

You can "tinker" around with Masonite by running:

$ craft tinker

This command will start a Python shell but also imports the container by default. So we can call:

Type `exit()` to exit.
>>> app
<masonite.app.App object at 0x10cfb8d30>
>>> app.make('Request')
<masonite.request.Request object at 0x10d03c8d0>
>>> app.collect("Mail*Driver")
{'MailSmtpDriver': <class 'masonite.drivers.MailSmtpDriver.MailSmtpDriver'>,
'MailMailgunDriver': <class 'masonite.drivers.MailMailgunDriver.MailMailgunDriver'>
}
>>> exit()

And play around the container. This is a useful debugging tool to verify that objects are loaded into the container if there are any issues.

Show Routes Command

Another useful command is the show:routes command which will display a table of available routes that can be hit:

$ craft show:routes

This will display a table that looks like:

========  =======  =======  ========  ============
Method    Path     Name     Domain    Middleware
========  =======  =======  ========  ============
GET       /        welcome
GET       /home    home
GET       /user 
POST      /create  user   
========  =======  =======  ========  ============

Application Information

If you are trying to debug your application or need help in the Slack channel, it might be beneficial to see some useful information information about your system and environment. In this case we have a simple command:

$ craft info

This will give some small details about the current system which could be useful to someone trying to help you. Running the command will give you something like this:

Environment Information
-------------------------  ------------------
System Information         MacOS x86_64 64bit
System Memory              8 GB
Python Version             CPython 3.6.5
Virtual Environment        ✓
Masonite Version           2.0.6
Craft Version              2.0.7
APP_ENV                    local
APP_DEBUG                  True

Feel free to contribute any additional information you think is necessary to the command in the core repository.

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 Validators

Validators are classes based on validating form or request input. We can create validators by running:

$ craft validator LoginValidator

Be sure to read the Validation documentation to learn more about validators.

Creating Model Definition Docstrings

Masonite uses Orator which is an active record style ORM. If you are coming from other Python frameworks you may be more familiar with Data Mapper ORM's like Django ORM or SQLAlchemy. These style ORM's are useful since the names of the column in your table are typically the names of class attributes. If you forget what you named your column you can typically just look at the model but if your model looks something like:

class User(Model):
    pass

Then it is not apparent what the tables are. We can run a simple command though to generate a docstring that we can throw onto our model:

$ craft model:docstring table_name

Which will generate something like this in the terminal:

"""Model Definition (generated with love by Masonite)

id: integer default: None
name: string(255) default: None
email: string(255) default: None
password: string(255) default: None
remember_token: string(255) default: None
created_at: datetime(6) default: CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(6)
updated_at: datetime(6) default: CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(6)
customer_id: string(255) default: None
plan_id: string(255) default: None
is_active: integer default: None
verified_at: datetime default: None
"""

We can now copy and paste that onto your model and change whatever we need to:

class User(Model):
    """Model Definition (generated with love by Masonite)

    id: integer default: None
    name: string(255) default: None
    email: string(255) default: None
    password: string(255) default: None
    remember_token: string(255) default: None
    created_at: datetime(6) default: CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(6)
    updated_at: datetime(6) default: CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(6)
    customer_id: string(255) default: None
    plan_id: string(255) default: None
    is_active: integer default: None
    verified_at: datetime default: None
    """
    pass

You can also specify the connection to use using the --connection option.

$ craft model:docstring table_name --connection amazon_db

Creating Controllers

If you wish to scaffold a controller, just run:

$ craft controller Dashboard

This command will create a new controller under app/http/controllers/DashboardController.py. By convention, all controllers should have an appended “Controller” and therefore Masonite will append "Controller" to the controller created.

You can create a controller without appending "Controller" to the end by running:

$ craft controller Dashboard -e

This will create a app/http/controllers/Dashboard.py file with a Dashboard controller. Notice that "Controller" is not appended.

-e is short for --exact. Either flag will work.

You may also create resource controllers which include standard resource actions such as show, create, update, etc:

$ craft controller Dashboard -r

-r is short for --resource. Either flag will work.

You can also obviously combine them:

$ craft controller Dashboard -r -e

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 boilerplate 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

Rolling Back and Rebuilding Migrations

You can also refresh and rollback all of your migrations and remigrate them.

This will essentially 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.

Model Shortcuts

You can also use the -s and -m flags to create a seed or model at the same time.

$ craft model ModelName -s -m

This is a shortcut for these 3 commands:

$ craft model ModelName
$ craft seed ModelName
$ craft migration create_tablename_table --create tablename

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 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.

Running Queues

Masonite has a queue feature that allows you to load the jobs you create in the section above and run them either asyncronously or send them off to a message broker like RabbitMQ. You may start the worker by running:

$ craft queue:work

You'll need to read the documentation in the Queues and Jobs documentation for futher info on how to setup this feature.

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

Creating Commands

You can scaffold out basic command boilerplate:

$ craft command Hello

This will create a app/commands/HelloCommand.py file with the HelloCommand class.

Running the WSGI Server

You can run the WSGI server by simply running:

$ craft serve

You will likely only use that command in production. For development, you can make the server autoreload after you save a python file, similiar to how Django does.

$ craft serve --reload

or the shorthand

$ craft serve -r

If you have unmigrated migrations, Masonite will recommend running craft migrate when running the server.

Host and Port

You can bind to a host using -b and/or a port using -p

$ craft serve -b 127.0.0.1 -p 8080

Reloading Interval

Masonite comes with a pretty quick auto reloading development server. By default there will be a 1 second delay between file change detection and the server reloading. This is a fairly slow reloading interval and most systems can handle a much faster interval while still properly managing the starting and killing of process PID's.

You can change the interval to something less then 1 using the -i option:

$ craft serve -r -i .1

You will notice a considerably faster reloading time on your machine. If your machine can handle this interval speed (meaning your machine is properly starting and killing the processes) then you can safely proceed using a lower interval during development.

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.