Introduction and Installation

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

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

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

NOTE: Masonite 2.3 is no longer compatible with the masonite-cli tool. Please uninstall that by running pip uninstall masonite-cli. If you do not uninstall masonite-cli you will have command clashes

Some Notable Features Shipped With Masonite

  • Easily send emails with the Mail Provider and the SMTP and Mailgun drivers.

  • Send websocket requests from your server with the Broadcast Provider and Pusher and Ably drivers.

  • IOC container and auto resolving dependency injection.

  • Service Providers to easily add functionality to the framework.

  • Extremely simple static files configured and ready to go.

  • Active Record style ORM called Orator.

  • An extremely useful command line tool called craft commands.

  • Extremely extendable.

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

Requirements

In order to use Masonite, you’ll need:

  • Python 3.5+

  • Latest version of OpenSSL

  • Pip3

All commands of python and pip in this documentation is assuming they are pointing to the correct Python 3 versions. For example, anywhere you see the python command ran it is assuming that is a Python 3.5+ Python installation. If you are having issues with any installation steps just be sure the commands are for Python 3.5+ and not 2.7 or below.

Linux

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

Debian and Ubuntu based Linux distributions

terminal
$ sudo apt install python3-dev python3-pip libssl-dev build-essential python3-venv

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

terminal
$ sudo apt-get install python3.6-dev python3-pip libssl-dev build-essential python3-venv

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

terminal
# dnf install python-devel openssl-devel

Installation

Be sure to join the Slack Channel for help or guidance.

Masonite excels at being simple to install and get going. If you are coming from previous versions of Masonite, the order of some of the installation steps have changed a bit.

Firstly, open a terminal and head to a directory you want to create your application in. You might want to create it in a programming directory for example:

$ cd ~/programming
$ mkdir myapp
$ cd myapp

If you are on windows you can just create a directory and open the directory in the Powershell.

Activating Our Virtual Environment (optional)

Although this step is technically optional, it is highly recommended. You can 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:

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

or if you are on Windows:

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

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

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

Installing Masonite

Now we can install Masonite. This will give us access to a craft command we can use to finish the install steps for us:

$ pip install masonite

Once Masonite installs you will now have access to the craft command line tool. Craft will become your best friend during your development. You will learn to love it very quickly :).

You can ensure Masonite and craft installed correctly by running:

$ craft

You should see a list of a few commands like install and new

Creating Our Project

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

terminal
$ craft

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

terminal
$ craft new

This will also run craft install which will install our dependencies.

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.

Additional Commands

Now that Masonite installed fully we can check all the new commands we have available. There are many :).

$ craft

We should see many more commands now.

Running The Server

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

terminal
$ 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 or continue on to learning about how to create web application by first reading the Routing documentation

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

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