A lightweight abstraction around Werkzeug for creating modular, reusable pieces of web application code. Similar in concept to Django apps.

Mostly for fun. If somebody actually finds it useful, that's a bonus.

Check out Bottle and Flask too.

• Roots is in an early stage of development and has unstable interfaces.
• Roots has explicit semantics where practical. Flask, for example, uses context locals where Roots passes through an 'environment' parameter explicitly.
• Roots provides command line management for your projects.
• Roots separates out the configuration (Manager) from the collections of routes (App).
• Roots has an emphasis on mounting sub-apps for modularity, although this is certainly possible in Bottle and Flask too. Flask has 'Module' objects.

• Hot explicit Python action.
• Modular.
• Configurable.
• Flexible.
• Well documented code.
• Batteries: completely optional extended functionality included.
  • Optional integration with Jinja2, SQLAlchemy, and more.
• Small and comprehensible.

• Add views to an app

    from roots.app import App
    from werkzeug.wrappers import Response
  
    demoapp = App('demoapp')
  
    @app.route("/<name>")
    def hello(env, name):
        return Response("Hello %s" % name)
  

• Reverse view names to URLs

    @app.route("/other/")
    def other(env):
        example_url = env.reverse("demoapp:hello", name="Joe")
        ...
  

• Mount child apps

    parent = App('parentapp')
    parent.mount(demoapp, "/child/")
  

• Command line invocation

    from roots.manager import Manager
  
    if __name__ == '__main__':
        Manager(root=demoapp).main()
  

  Run a server with:

    $ python2 app.py run --host <host> --port <port> --reloader
  

• Extend command line functionality

    from roots.manager import Manager
    from roots.integration import sqlalchemy
  
    if __name__ == '__main__':
        manager = Manager(root=demoapp)
        manager.commands.use_object(sqlalchemy)
        manager.main()
  

• Define new commands

    from roots.manager import Manager
    from roots.command import command
  
    @command()
    def hello(manager, name="Joe"):
        '''Say hello!'''
        print "Hello %s!" % name
  
    if __name__ == '__main__':
        manager = Manager(root=demoapp)
        manager.commands.add(hello)
        manager.main()
  

  Results in:

    $ python2 app.py hello --name you
    Hello you!
  

• SQLAlchemy helpers.
  • Associate metadata with apps.
  • Table creation/deletion management commands.
• Jinja2 helpers.
• Tutorials and API documentation.
• User authentication app, using SQLAlchemy.

Copyright 2011 Kevin Mahoney.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.