lockfile

🔥 Why lockfile

lockfile provides a minimalistic and modern implementation of a simple file-based lock mechanism for Python.

• Minimalistic: lockfile does one thing, and one thing only
• Modern: lockfile supports pathlib.Path objects
• Type annotated: lockfile provides comprehensive type annotations
• Convinient: lockfile automatically appendx a .lock suffix if needed
• Clean: all code is formatted with Black and checked with MyPy and flake8

There are a number of alternatives such as py-filelock and FileLock that actually inspired this project but are more complex and somewhat outdated.

📖 Documentation

Just look at this README and the code, it's really simple.

🚀 Quickstart

No installation, just copy lockfile.py to your project. It has zero dependencies beyond Python 3.6 or newer.

If you think an installable package might be useful, just open an issue.

🎉 Example

You can safely run the following code in two separate processes:

from pathlib import Path
from lockfile import Lock

path = Path("example.txt")
with Lock(path):
    # Note: you don't need to use the lock to write to that specific file,
    # it can be used for anything

    with open(path, "w") as f:
        f.write("Hello!")

🗺 Use cases

Whenever you need a simple, file-based locking mechanism in Python, for example when you want to write to the same file from different processes, possibly even from different machines using a shared file system (Note: NFS will usually not provide the necessary guarantees, but there are other shared (cluster) file systems that do).

🐍 Compatibility

Python 3.6 and newer