Python async client

[hyzyla]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I want to use ory/kratos in asynchronous python app, built using aiohttp

Describe the solution you'd like

Add python asynchronous client, especially when openapi-generator-cli, supports generating clients based on asyncio

Describe alternatives you've considered

Build wrapper around API by myself, only for my project

[aeneasr]

How well is that generator supported?

[hyzyla]

https://openapi-generator.tech/docs/generators/python

It's possible to build a separate package specially for asyncio. Something like ory-kratos-client-async. Ideally if it will be one package that support both libraries: urllib3 and asyncio, but I didn't find if this possible by generator at all.

[aeneasr]

I think a good first try would be to generate the client as a PoC and see how well the generated code works. Would you be up for that?

Also, would asyncio also support synchronous operations? Or can we only have one or the other?

[hyzyla]

Would you be up for that?

Yes, I will try to add in few days

Also, would asyncio also support synchronous operations? Or can we only have one or the other?

You can use asynchronous functions in synchronous code, but it's not easy to do. For every asynchronous function, synchronous code should start event loop, run asynchronous function and then shutdown event loop.

[lorddaedra]

You can use async_to_sync and sync_to_async helpers to do that

https://github.com/django/asgiref/blob/main/asgiref/sync.py

[aeneasr]

So what do today's python developers prefer? Async or sync? Or is it 50/50?

[lorddaedra]

For I/O bound tasks async client looks as advantage. That's why I would like to see async-first client. Even Django can be deployed using ASGI interface and use async code in views and middleware. (Django ORM is still sync so need use sync_to_async wrapper).

Starlette/FastAPI (one of the server implementation to create OpenAPI compatible APIs) communities are big enough (completely async web frameworks). Ariadne (GraphQL server) based on Starlette too.

But there are tasks where you will not see any difference between sync and async and because of sync code looks simpler to write and understand for newbies developers will use it too (for pet or small business or legacy projects)...

But for current project (and for any projects like "Python client to some server") async implementation looks better.

[lorddaedra]

Also check https://grpc.github.io/grpc/python/grpc_asyncio.html
May be you should create gRPC based client instead of OpenAPI based...

[lorddaedra]

@hyzyla
Check this https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/best-python-http-clients/
AIOHTTP and HTTPX looks better than urllib3 (But even better to use gRPC instead of OpenAPI endpoints for modern environments.)

[aeneasr]

gRPC would be a completely different beast ;) For one, it doesn't work very well in browser (e.g. AJAX) environments. First we need to get the REST API clients generated correctly! :)

[Benehiko]

Although it is true to have I/O tasks asynchronous from the get go, I do feel like if you have synchronous code you can wrap it yourself using your own asynchronous implementation (the other way around isn't always that straight-forward). I would leave it as it is and allow each user to decide for themselves how they would like it implemented.

If the demand is really high for asynchronous clients then releasing a separate client would probably be the best route to go.

Just my 2 cents

[ermik]

All points about async-bias as well as industry shift towards gRPC make sense to me. There's a very similar ticket in the kubernetes-client repo which has a lot of useful thoughts on the matter, while the repo itself has some great patterns for SDK maintenance.

Haven't tried the OpenAPI codegen for Python in a little bit, so I wonder — and I understand asyncio is preferred as a much more versatile framework — have you tried using the async_req mode for the existing libraries?

sdk/clients/client/python/ory_client/api_client.py

Line 347 in 382407c

async_req: typing.Optional[bool] = None,

[nitedani]

If you pass async_req=True, it doesn't return an awaitable. It returns a multiprocessing.pool.ApplyResult
To convert that to an asyncio awaitable, I do this:

import asyncio
from typing import Union
from multiprocessing.pool import ApplyResult, AsyncResult


async def async_result_to_awaitable(result: Union[ApplyResult, AsyncResult]):
    timeout = 10
    breaker = True

    async def awaitable():
        while breaker:
            await asyncio.sleep(0.001)
            if result.ready():
                return result.get()

    try:
        return await asyncio.wait_for(awaitable(), timeout=timeout)
    except asyncio.TimeoutError as e:
        breaker = False
        raise e

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