spiderweb

As a professional web developer focusing on arcane uses of Django for arcane purposes, it occurred to me a little while ago that I didn't actually know how a web framework worked.

So I built one.

spiderweb is a small web framework, just big enough to hold a spider. Getting started is easy:

poetry add spiderweb-framework

Create a new file and drop this in it:

from spiderweb import SpiderwebRouter
from spiderweb.response import HttpResponse

app = SpiderwebRouter()

@app.route("/")
def index(request):
    return HttpResponse("HELLO, WORLD!")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.start()

My goal with this framework was to do three things:

1. Learn a lot
2. Create an unholy blend of Django and Flask
3. Not look at any existing code. Go off of vibes alone and try to solve all the problems I could think of in my own way

And, honestly, I think I got there. Here's a non-exhaustive list of things this can do:

• Function-based views
• Optional Flask-style URL routing
• Optional Django-style URL routing
• URLs with variables in them a lá Django
• Gunicorn support
• Full middleware implementation
• Limit routes by HTTP verbs
• Custom error routes
• Built-in dev server
• HTML templates with Jinja2
• Static files support
• Cookies (reading and setting)
• Optional append_slash (with automatic redirects!)
• CSRF middleware implementation (it's there, but it's crappy and unsafe. I'm working on it.)
• Optional POST data validation middleware with Pydantic
• Database support (using Peewee, but the end user can use whatever they want as long as there's a Peewee driver for it)
• Session middleware

The TODO list:

• Tests (important)
• Fix CSRF middleware

Once tests are in and proven to work, then I'll release as version 1.0.

More documentation to follow!

If you're reading this on GitHub, this repository is a public mirror of https://git.joekaufeld.com/jkaufeld/spiderweb.