paddycarey / nacelle

A lightweight Python web framework (built on top of webapp2) for use on Google Appengine

Nacelle Microframework

nacelle is a lightweight Python web framework, built on top of webapp2, designed for use on Google Appengine.

nacelle aims to provide a small but solid set of tools that enable developers to quickly get a new app up and running, whilst not sacrificing any of the flexibility and power of webapp2 in the process. Nacelle is suitable for building everything from tiny prototypes to large complex applications, it should never get in your way.

Note

If you need portability from appengine then nacelle probably isn't for you, use Django, Flask or one of the many other awesome Python web frameworks that exist, you'll thank me later.

• Free software: MIT license
• Documentation: http://nacelle.rtfd.org.

Features

• Authentication using Appengine's built-in users service
• Custom testrunner to help with loading the appengine environment for nose
• Error handling (with optional logging to a sentry server)
• Session management and automatic secret key generation
• Template rendering (with Jinja2 or Handlebars)
• Easily run tasks in the background outside of the request loop

nacelle's Issues

Add 'contrib' apps system.

Like Django, nacelle can make use of a plugable apps system (of sorts, much less rigid than django's).

In an effort to prevent bloat in nacelle's core, a contrib directory should be created where packages/modules can live that are nice to have features, but that don't necessarily belong in core e.g. social auth, lockdown, GCE interaction etc.

Add fixture loader for tests

Add a module that can load test/development fixtures from file and import them into the datastore at runtime.

webapp2 auth default dispatcher failing

nacelle's default dispatcher expects your request handler to actually return a response rather than just doing self.response.write

Can't easily identify/manipulate vendored dependencies

Nacelle currently includes several vendored dependencies in the /nacelle/vendor/ directory (which is added to the python path when the app runs). Currently the packages are just dropped in place with little regard to versioning or introspectability.

We need a simple method (probably a makefile command) that can iterate over the depencies and spit out version numbers (both locally and checking pypi for an updated version). This may require a change to the way libraries are loaded in nacelle.

Add quickstart guide

Need to add a quickstart guide to the docs.

Guide should cover:

• Initial setup/install
• Basic routing
• Basic request handling

Links to more in-depth documentation should be provided throughout.