Python file with closing automatically

December 3, 2011
2 comments Python

Perhaps someone who knows more about the internals of python and the recent changes in 2.6 and 2.7 can explain this question that came up today in a code review.

I suggest using with instead of try: ... finally: to close a file that was written to. Instead of this:


dest = file('foo', 'w')
try:
   dest.write('stuff')
finally:
   dest.close()
print open('foo').read()  # will print 'stuff'

We can use this:


with file('foo', 'w') as dest: 
    dest.write('stuff')
print open('foo').read()  # will print 'stuff'

Why does that work? I'm guessing it's because the file() instance object has a built in __exit__ method. Is that right?

That means I don't need to use contextlib.closing(thing) right?

For example, suppose you have this class:


class Farm(object):
   def __enter__(self):
       print "Entering"
       return self
   def __exit__(self, err_type, err_val, err_tb):
       print "Exiting", err_type
       self.close()
   def close(self):
       print "Closing"

with Farm() as farm:
   pass
# this will print:
#   Entering
#   Exiting None
#   Closing

Another way to achieve the same specific result would be to use the closing() decrorator:


class Farm(object):
   def close(self):
       print "Closing"

from contextlib import closing
with closing(Farm()) as farm:
   pass
# this will print:
#   Closing

So the closing() decorator "steals" the __enter__ and __exit__. This last one can be handy if you do this:


from contextlib import closing
with closing(Farm()) as farm:
   raise ValueError

# this will print
#  Closing
#  Traceback (most recent call last):
#   File "dummy.py", line 16, in <module>
#     raise ValueError
#  ValueError

This is turning into my own loud thinking and I think I get it now. contextlib.closing() basically makes it possible to do what I did there with the __enter__ and __exit__ and it seems the file() built-in has a exit handler that takes care of the closing already so you don't have to do it with any extra decorators.

Integrate BrowserID in a Tornado web app

November 22, 2011
2 comments Tornado, Mozilla

Integrate BrowserID in a Tornado web app BrowserID is a new single sign-on initiative lead by Mozilla that takes a very refreshing approach to single sign-on. It's basically like OpenID except better and similar to the OAuth solutions from Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc but without being tied to those closed third-parties.

At the moment, BrowserID is ready for production (I have it on Kwissle) but the getting started docs is still something that is under active development (I'm actually contributing to this).

Anyway, I thought I'd share how to integrate it with Tornado

First, you need to do the client-side of things. I use jQuery but that's not a requirement to be able to use BrowserID. Also, there are different "patterns" to do login. Either you have a header that either says "Sign in"/"Hi Your Username". Or you can have a dedicated page (e.g. mysite.com/login/). Let's, for simplicity sake, pretend we build a dedicated page to log in. First, add the necessary HTML:


<a href="#" id="browserid" title="Sign-in with BrowserID">
  <img src="/images/sign_in_blue.png" alt="Sign in">
</a>
<script src="https://browserid.org/include.js" async></script>

Next you need the Javascript in place so that clicking on the link above will open the BrowserID pop-up:


function loggedIn(response) {
  location.href = response.next_url;
  /* alternatively you could do something like this instead:
       $('#header .loggedin').show().text('Hi ' + response.first_name);
    ...or something like that */
}

function gotVerifiedEmail(assertion) {
 // got an assertion, now send it up to the server for verification
 if (assertion !== null) {
   $.ajax({
     type: 'POST',
     url: '/auth/login/browserid/',
     data: { assertion: assertion },
     success: function(res, status, xhr) {
       if (res === null) {}//loggedOut();
       else loggedIn(res);
     },
     error: function(res, status, xhr) {
       alert("login failure" + res);
     }
   });
 }
 else {
   //loggedOut();
 }
}

$(function() {
  $('#browserid').click(function() {
    navigator.id.getVerifiedEmail(gotVerifiedEmail);
    return false;
  });
});

Next up is the server-side part of BrowserID. Your job is to take the assertion that is given to you by the AJAX POST and trade that with https://browserid.org for an email address:


import urllib
import tornado.web
import tornado.escape 
import tornado.httpclient
...

@route('/auth/login/browserid/')  # ...or whatever you use
class BrowserIDAuthLoginHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):

   def check_xsrf_cookie(self):  # more about this later
       pass

   @tornado.web.asynchronous
   def post(self):
       assertion = self.get_argument('assertion')
       http_client = tornado.httpclient.AsyncHTTPClient()
       domain = 'my.domain.com'  # MAKE SURE YOU CHANGE THIS
       url = 'https://browserid.org/verify'
       data = {
         'assertion': assertion,
         'audience': domain,
       }
       response = http_client.fetch(
         url,
         method='POST',
         body=urllib.urlencode(data),
         callback=self.async_callback(self._on_response)
       )

   def _on_response(self, response):
       struct = tornado.escape.json_decode(response.body)
       if struct['status'] != 'okay':
           raise tornado.web.HTTPError(400, "Failed assertion test")
       email = struct['email']
       self.set_secure_cookie('user', email,
                                  expires_days=1)
       self.set_header("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=UTF-8")
       response = {'next_url': '/'}
       self.write(tornado.escape.json_encode(response))
       self.finish()

Now that should get you up and running. There's of couse a tonne of things that can be improved. Number one thing to improve is to use XSRF on the AJAX POST. The simplest way to do that would be to somehow dump the XSRF token generated into your page and include it in the AJAX POST. Perhaps something like this:


<script>
var _xsrf = '{{ xsrf_token }}';
...
function gotVerifiedEmail(assertion) {
 // got an assertion, now send it up to the server for verification
 if (assertion !== null) {  
    $.ajax({
     type: 'POST',
     url: '/auth/login/browserid/',
     data: { assertion: assertion, _xsrf: _xsrf },
... 
</script>

Another thing that could obviously do with a re-write is the way users are handled server-side. In the example above I just set the asserted user's email address in a secure cookie. More realistically, you'll have a database of users who you match by email address but instead store their database ID in a cookie or something like that.

What's so neat about solutions such as OpenID, BrowserID, etc. is that you can combine two things in one process: Sign-in and Registration. In your app, all you need to do is a simple if statement in the code like this:


user = self.db.User.find_by_email(email) 
if not user:
    user = self.db.User()
    user.email = email
    user.save()
self.set_secure_cookie('user', str(user.id))

Hopefully that'll encourage a couple of more Tornadonauts to give BrowserID a try.

Trivial but powerful tips for nosetests

November 19, 2011
0 comments Python

I'm clearly still a nosetests beginner because it was only today that I figured out how to set certain plugins to always be on.

First of all you might like these plugins too:


$ pip install rudolf
$ pip install disabledoc

Docs: rudolf and disabledoc

To get these gorgeous little tricks into every run of nosetests edit the file ~/.noserc and add the following:


[nosetests]
with-disable-docstring=1
with-color=1

That should make your life a little easier.

UPDATE:

I've since managed to shoot myself in both legs with messing around with nosetests plugins because I heavily rely on django-nose in Django. Long story short: be careful if you get strange import related errors!

Going real simple on HTML5 audio

October 14, 2011
0 comments Web development, JavaScript

DoneCal users are to 80+% Chrome and Firefox users. Both Firefox and Chrome support the HTML <audio> element without any weird plugins and they both support the Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) file format. change log here

So, I used use the rather enterprisey plugin called SoundManager2 which attempts to abstract away all hacks into one single API. It uses a mix of browser sniffing, HTML5 and Flash. Although very promising, it is quite cumbersome. It doesn't work flawlessly despite their hard efforts. Unfortunately, using it also means a 30kb (optimized) Javascript file and a 3kb .swf file (if needed). So, instead of worrying about my very few Internet Explorer users I decided to go really dumb and simple on this.

The solution basically looks like this:


// somewhere.js
var SOUND_URLS = {
  foo: 'path/to/foo.ogg',
  egg: 'path/to/egg.ogg'
};

// play-sounds.js

/* Call to create and partially download the audo element.
 * You can all this as much as you like. */
function preload_sound(key) {
 var id = 'sound-' + key;
 if (!document.getElementById(id)) {
   if (!SOUND_URLS[key]) {
     throw "Sound for '" + key + "' not defined";
   } else if (SOUND_URLS[key].search(/\.ogg/i) == -1) {
     throw "Sound for '" + key + "' must be .ogg URL";
   }
   var a = document.createElement('audio');
   a.setAttribute('id', id);
   a.setAttribute('src', SOUND_URLS[key]);
   document.body.appendChild(a);
 }
 return id;
}

function play_sound(key) {
  document.getElementById(preload_sound(key)).play();
}

// elsewhere.js
$.lightbox.open({
   onComplete: function() {
      preload_sound('foo');
   }
});
$('#lightbox button').click(function() {
   play_sound('foo');
});

Basically, only Firefox, Chrome and Opera support .ogg but it's a good and open source encoding so I don't mind being a bit of an asshole about it. This little script could be slightly extended with some browser sniffing to work with Safari people but right now it doesn't feel like it's worth the effort.

This make me happy and I feel lean and light. A good feeling!

Too Cool For Me?

September 25, 2011
0 comments Tornado

Too Cool For Me? Too Cool For Me? is a fun little side-project I've been working on. It's all about and only for Twitter. You login, then install a bookmarklet then when browsing twitter you can see who follows you and who is too cool for you.

For me it's a chance to try some new tech and at the same time scratch an itch I had. The results can be quite funny but also sad too when you realise that someone uncool isn't following you even though you follow him/her.

The code is open source and available on Github and at least it might help people see how to do a web app in Tornado using MongoDB and asynchronous requests to the Twitter API

Goodies from tornado-utils - part 3: send_mail

September 24, 2011
0 comments Tornado

This is Part 3 in a series of blogs about various bits and pieces in the tornado-utils package. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here

send_mail

Code is here

First of all, I should say: I didn't write much of this code. It's copied from Django and modified to work in any Tornado app. It hinges on the same idea as Django that you have to specify what backend you want to use. A backend is an importable string pointing to a class that has the send_messages method.

To begin, here's a sample use case inside a request handler:


class ContactUs(tornado.web.RequestHandler):

   def post(self):
       msg = self.get_argument('msg')
       # NB: you might want to set this once and for all in something 
       # like self.application.settings['email_backend']
       backend = 'tornado_utils.send_mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
       send_email(backend,
                  "New contact form entry",
                  msg + '\n\n--\nFrom our contact form\n',
                  'noreply@example.com',
                  ['webmaster@example.com'],
                  )
       self.write("Thanks!")

The problem is that SMTP is slow. Even though, in human terms, it's fast, it's still too slow for a non-blocking server that Tornado is. Taking 1-2 seconds to send a message over SMTP means it's blocking every other request to Tornado for 1-2 seconds. The solution is instead save the message on disk in pickled form and use a cron job to pick up the messages and send them by SMTP instead, outside the Tornado process. First do this re-write:


   ... 
   def post(self):
       msg = self.get_argument('msg')
-       backend = 'tornado_utils.send_mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
+       backend = 'tornado_utils.send_mail.backends.pickle.EmailBackend'
   ...

Now, write a cron job script that looks something like this:


# send_pickled_messages.py
DRY_RUN = False

def main():
   from tornado_utils.send_mail import config
   filenames = glob(os.path.join(config.PICKLE_LOCATION, '*.pickle'))
   filenames.sort()
   if not filenames:
       return

   from tornado_utils.send_mail import backends
   import cPickle

   if DRY_RUN:
       EmailBackend = backends.console.EmailBackend
   else:
       EmailBackend = backends.smtp.EmailBackend
   max_count = 10
   filenames = filenames[:max_count]
   messages = [cPickle.load(open(x, 'rb')) for x in filenames]
   backend = EmailBackend()
   backend.send_messages(messages)
   if not DRY_RUN:
       for filename in filenames:
           os.remove(filename)

That code just above is butchered from a more comprehensive script I have but you get the idea. Writing to a pickle file is so fast it's in the lower milliseconds region. However, it depends on disk IO so if you need more speed, write a simple backend that writes instead of saving pickles on disk, make it write to a fast in-memory database like Redis or Memcache.

The code isn't new and it's been battle tested but it's only really been battle tested in the way that my apps use it. So you might stumble across bugs if you use it in a way I haven't tested. However, the code is Open Source and happily available for you to help out and improve.

Goodies from tornado-utils - part 2: tornado_static

September 22, 2011
0 comments Tornado

This is Part 2 in a series of blogs about various bits and pieces in the tornado-utils package. Part 1 is here

tornado_static

Code is here

This code takes care of two things: 1) optimizing your static resources and 2) bundling and serving them with unique names so you can cache aggressively.

The trick is to make your development environment such that there's no need to do anything when in "debug mode" but when in "production mode" it needs to be perfect. Which files (e.g. jquery.js or style.css) you use and bundle is up to you and it's something you control from the templates in your Tornado app. Not a config setting because, almost always, which resources (aka. assets) you need is known and relevant only to the templates where you're working.

Using UI modules in Tornado requires a bit of Tornado-fu but here's one example and here is another (untested) example:


# app.py

import tornado.web
from tornado_utils.tornado_static import (
  StaticURL, Static, PlainStaticURL, PlainStatic) 

class Application(tornado.web.Application):
   def __init__(self):
       ui_modules = {}
       if options.debug:
           ui_modules['Static'] = PlainStatic
           ui_modules['StaticURL'] = PlainStaticURL
       else:
           ui_modules['Static'] = Static
           ui_modules['StaticURL'] = StaticURL

       app_settings = dict(
           template_path="templates",
           static_path="static",
           ui_modules=ui_modules,
           debug=options.debug,
           UGLIFYJS_LOCATION='~/bin/uglifyjs',
           CLOSURE_LOCATION="static/compiler.jar",
           YUI_LOCATION="static/yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar",
           cdn_prefix="cdn.mycloud.com",
       )

       handlers = [
         (r"/", HomeHandler),
         (r"/entry/([0-9]+)", EntryHandler),
       ] 
       super(Application, self).__init__(handlers, **app_settings)

def main(): # pragma: no cover
   tornado.options.parse_command_line()
   http_server = tornado.httpserver.HTTPServer(Application())
   http_server.listen(options.port)
   tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

if __name__ == "__main__":
   main()

Note! If you're looking to optimize your static resources in a Tornado app you probably already have a "framework" for setting up UI modules into your app. The above code is just to wet your appetite and to show how easy it is to set up. The real magic starts to happen in the template code. Here's a sample implementation:


<!doctype html>
<html>
   <head>
       <title>{% block title %}{{ page_title }}{% end %}</title>
       <meta charset="utf-8">
       {% module Static("css/ext/jquery.gritter.css", "css/style.css") %}
   </head>
   <body>
      <header>...</header>
   {% block content %}
   {% end %}
   {% module Static("js/ext/head.load.min.js") %}
   <script>
   var POST_LOAD = '{% module StaticURL("js/dojo.js", "js/dojo.async.js") %}';
   </script>
   </body>
</html>

What you get when run is a template that looks like this:


<!doctype html>
<html>
   <head>
       <title>My title</title>
       <meta charset="utf-8">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="//cdn.mycloud.com/combined/jquery.gritter.css.style.1313206609.css">
   </head>
   ...

(Note that this will create a whitespace optimized filed called "jquery.gritter.css.style.1313206609.css" in "/tmp/combined")

Have a play and see if it makes sense in your app. I do believe this can do with some Open Source love but so far it works great for me on Kwissle, DoneCal and TooCoolFor.Me

Goodies from tornado-utils - part 1: TestClient

September 20, 2011
0 comments Tornado

This is Part 1 in a series of blogs about various bits and pieces in the tornado-utils package.

tornado-utils is the result of me working on numerous web apps in Tornado that after too much copy-and-paste from project to project eventually became a repo standing on its own two legs.

TestClient

Code is here

This makes it possible to write integration tests that executes GET and POST requests on your app similarly to how Django does it. Example implementation:


# tests/base.py

from tornado_utils.http_test_client import TestClient, HTTPClientMixin
from tornado.testing import LogTrapTestCase, AsyncHTTPTestCase

class BaseAsyncTestCase(AsyncHTTPTestCase, LogTrapTestCase):
   pass 

class BaseHTTPTestCase(BaseAsyncTestCase, HTTPClientMixin):

   def setUp(self):
       super(BaseHTTPTestCase, self).setUp()
       self.client = TestClient(self)

# tests/test_handlers.py

from .base import BaseHTTPTestCase

class HandlersTestCase(BaseHTTPTestCase):

   def setUp(self):
       super(HandlersTestCase, self).setUp()
       self._create_user('peterbe', 'secret')  # use your imagination

   def test_homepage(self):
       response = self.client.get('/')
       self.assertEqual(response.code, 200)
       self.assertTrue('stranger' in response.body)

       data = {'username': 'peterbe', 'password': 'secret'}
       response = self.client.post('/login/', data)
       self.assertEqual(response.code, 302)

       response = self.client.get('/')
       self.assertEqual(response.code, 200)
       self.assertTrue('stranger' not in response.body)
       self.assertTrue('hi peterbe' in response.body)

You can see a sample implementation of this here

Note that this was one of the first pieces of test code I wrote in my very first Tornado app and it's not unlikely that some assumptions and approaches are naive or even wrong but what we have here works and it makes the test code very easy to read. All it basically does is wraps the http_client.fetch(...) call and also maintains a bucket of cookies

I hope it can be useful to someone new to writing tests in Tornado.