spiderweb/docs

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.

This is spiderweb, a web framework that's just big enough to hold a spider. When building it, my goals were simple:

• Learn a lot
• Create an unholy blend of Django and Flask
• 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

Warning

This is a learning project. It should not be used for production without heavy auditing. It's not secure. It's not fast. It's not well-tested. It's not well-documented. It's not well-anything. It's a learning project.

That being said, it's fun and it works, so I'm counting that as a win.

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
• Full middleware implementation
• Limit routes by HTTP verbs
  • (Only GET and POST are implemented right now)
• Custom error routes
• Built-in dev server
• Gunicorn support
• 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. This might be beyond my skillset.)
• 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 with built-in session store
• Tests (currently a little over 80% coverage)

The TODO list:

• Fix CSRF middleware
• Add more HTTP verbs