🙏 Find maintainers for FastAPI

[k4black]

First Check

• I added a very descriptive title to this issue.
• I used the GitHub search to find a similar issue and didn't find it.
• I searched the FastAPI documentation, with the integrated search.
• I already searched in Google "How to X in FastAPI" and didn't find any information.
• I already read and followed all the tutorial in the docs and didn't find an answer.
• I already checked if it is not related to FastAPI but to Pydantic.
• I already checked if it is not related to FastAPI but to Swagger UI.
• I already checked if it is not related to FastAPI but to ReDoc.

Commit to Help

• I commit to help with one of those options 👆

Description

At the moment, all contributions to the FastAPI are made with @tiangolo (directly or through a PR review).

@tiangolo is doing a great job 💪, but fast developing project with great community like FastAPI demand much more time.
(It can be seen by the number of open issues and pull request)

Wanted Solution

Suggestion is to find several active community members and add them to the repository maintainers, as other projects (e.g. Flask and Django) do. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

This will help the development of the project and make the atmosphere for third-party contributors much more pleasant. 👾

Hope @tiangolo will consider this possibility

upd: discussion on this #3970

Wanted Code

from fastapi.community import active_members  

active_members.make_maintainers()

[peterHoburg]

100% this. To stay at the level of Flask and Django, there needs to be a team of core maintainers. We can't just rely on a single person.

FastAPI being a single maintainer project is a big reason some companies don't want to start experimenting with it/using it.

[k4black]

Totally! We have the same issue in our company
FastAPI is Great and we use it for demo and inner projects, however, for production we have to use something else.

I really want it become only-option for python api. And we'll have 1.0.0 soon with a great maintainers team.

[benjamin-kirkbride]

@k4black it's not clear if this is just something that you hope for, or if it's an initiative that you have @tiangolo's blessing to undertake. Can you clarify?

[k4black]

@benjamin-kirkbride No, it's an initiative. Sorry if I was vague.

This is an enhancement issue, so it is call to the community in general and to @tiangolo in particular to consider this way of developing of the FastAPI.

[benjamin-kirkbride]

Some past discussion has taken place here: #3970

[xidoc]

There are Microsoft and Netflix that use fastapi.

Maybe it's possible to have reinforcement, help by these 2 futur sponsors technically and financially and why not organisationally

[cheradenine]

As a team lead I am evaluating Fast API for a major new project and of course one of the things to do is look through issues, how many open PRs there are and to understand the governance of a project.
After reading this discussion #3970 I'm having some reservations.
The project looks excellent, great documentation, features, ease of use, big name companies using it, but a bus factor of 1 gives me pause.

[v3ss0n]

@tiangolo seems to be burnt out and he may need his well deserved rest. I agree this project needs to be openly maintained by a group of community members.
Meanwhile , Sanic is now getting in shape and it have proper maintainers , i am thinking to switch to sanic , which now have extension support and active community of maintainers

[v3ss0n]

how many open PRs there are and to understand the governance of a project

its a shame that amount of quality PRs that have been ignored.

[etimberg]

If an initiative gets going with more maintainers, I'm happy to volunteer time. I am currently using FastAPI in production though I haven't contributed to the codebase yet. I can probably help with issue triage and PR review to start. I do have extensive opensource experience from other projects.

[k4black]

@etimberg I guess, the bottleneck here is not the number of maintainers 😅
Ironically, This issue may not be considered due to the issues being discussed

[v3ss0n]

If an initiative gets going with more maintainers, I'm happy to volunteer time. I am currently using FastAPI in production though I haven't contributed to the codebase yet. I can probably help with issue triage and PR review to start. I do have extensive opensource experience from other projects.

There are alot of good quality PRS that needed to be merged, that shows that there are a lot of good developers wanting to maintain this project.
We only need from the owner to:

• appoint a few active maintainers who willing to commit some time to review code and merge
• that would only take a few hours.
• open governance of this project ( you can adopt a model , like zeromq governance system)
  He could even put a paid maintainer since there are over 170 paid sponsors on this project.

[kevr]

  He could even put a paid maintainer since there are over 170 paid sponsors on this project.

This is part that worries me about this whole thing; he hasn't been seen commenting on pretty urgent threads in months. Things that have already been figured out and just need a simple merge; I wonder if something's happened to 'em.

[alonme]

@kevr - I hope he is alright. you can see that he does work on other projects, see https://github.com/tiangolo/asyncer for example

[kevr]

@kevr - I hope he is alright. you can see that he does work on other projects, see https://github.com/tiangolo/asyncer for example

...I guess that's even worse. He's straight out ignoring a project that he gets sponsorship from, and that starlette primarily implemented for him.

We've been using FastAPI for a new version of Arch Linux's User Repository in development for the past half a year or so; after running into a number of real issues that have been quickly closed for unreal reasons, then seeing how all of this plays out for a minimal core dep upgrade, I'm considering just moving everything over to using Starlette and taking FastAPI's Form implementation for our own project; we will most likely do so, in fact.

The starlette devs themselves do a great job at looking at their project.

[adriangb]

Edit: it looks like the comment this was in reference to was deleted. So this is now out of context. It was specifically replying to a comment suggesting gitflow could help with FastAPI's development.

I'd rather see the merge queue feature used. No one should be using GitFlow nowadays (see https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow, "Gitflow is a legacy Git workflow")

[alexiri]

I came here pissed off about how long #4145 took to get merged, I agreed with the complaints about not having other maintainers that could merge PRs and I was a bit disappointed by @tiangolo's reply. However, having had some time to think about it and having just read this, I have to say that he is totally right.

This is his project and he can do with it whatever he wants, including nothing. I don't have a maintenance contract with him, so there is no reason why he should care that not merging #4145 for two months was making my life slightly more difficult. Even if I were sponsoring him, that would still be money with no strings attached and he is under no obligation to give me the time of day.

Do I wish this were different? Sure, but then I should either sign a contract with him that states what his obligations are and what he gets in exchange, or I should fork the project and use my version instead. If using a particular framework is that big of a risk for my company, then surely it is reasonable to spend money to mitigate that risk.

Complaining about the "governance" is polite shorthand for "I want better service for free", and that is not something I can demand.

@tiangolo, thanks for all your hard work, I really appreciate it and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

[v3ss0n]

@tiangolo thanks for the reply, I have now see the direction and vague view of your decision for governance.it's seems to mean : "It's my project so, codes have to come from me "
Thanks anyways, that's help alot in making technology decisions. Take care man.

[kevr]

I came here pissed off about how long #4145 took to get merged, I agreed with the complaints about not having other maintainers that could merge PRs and I was a bit disappointed by @tiangolo's reply. However, having had some time to think about it and having just read this, I have to say that he is totally right.

This is his project and he can do with it whatever he wants, including nothing. I don't have a maintenance contract with him, so there is no reason why he should care that not merging #4145 for two months was making my life slightly more difficult. Even if I were sponsoring him, that would still be money with no strings attached and he is under no obligation to give me the time of day.

Do I wish this were different? Sure, but then I should either sign a contract with him that states what his obligations are and what he gets in exchange, or I should fork the project and use my version instead. If using a particular framework is that big of a risk for my company, then surely it is reasonable to spend money to mitigate that risk.

Complaining about the "governance" is polite shorthand for "I want better service for free", and that is not something I can demand.

@tiangolo, thanks for all your hard work, I really appreciate it and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Frankly, it's not service for free. Look at the list of donations he gets all across the open source community. He's being paid to support this project. imho, this guy should be linking his sponsor button directly to starlette; or he should've named this project starlette-pydantic instead; not just give them a small fraction of the income of a framework that adds 5% of code overall and rename it under a different branding.

Additionally, I do just want to add: none of what we're saying is degrading the time and effort he has put into the project, and we're all thankful for this; it was a lot of our reasons for choosing the project. We are not ungrateful for this. I can't speak for others, but for us personally, we were eager to use the project.

[alexiri]

Frankly, it's not service for free. Look at the list of donations he gets all across the open source community.

Maybe the emphasis will help. A donation is not a payment for a service.

[Ivoz]

Frankly, it's not service for free. Look at the list of donations he gets all across the open source community. He's being paid to support this project. imho, this guy should be linking his sponsor button directly to starlette; or he should've named this project starlette-pydantic instead; not just give them a small fraction of the income of a framework that adds 5% of code overall and rename it under a different branding.

If it's such a small amount of code and such an annoyance, just fork this project, merge all the PRs, implement a community governance model that works and start accepting donations of which you give 80% of to Starlette. Can't be too hard. /s

[ghost]

@tiangolo there seems to be lots of peple who would like to see the project run in a different way.

Would you be OK with a fork being created?

I'm not saying I'd do it, I'm just curious to know if you would object to that, because it seems the obvious solution to the many people who seem unhappy with the way its currently being run.

Sometimes project founders have no problem at all with forks, sometimes project founders get upset about it. I'm just wondering how you would feel.

[v3ss0n]

Frankly, it's not service for free. Look at the list of donations he gets all across the open source community. He's being paid to support this project. imho, this guy should be linking his sponsor button directly to starlette; or he should've named this project starlette-pydantic instead; not just give them a small fraction of the income of a framework that adds 5% of code overall and rename it under a different branding.

If it's such a small amount of code and such an annoyance, just fork this project, merge all the PRs, implement a community governance model that works and start accepting donations of which you give 80% of to Starlette. Can't be too hard.

Starlite is going that way . Not worth forking anyways since Startlite is better implemented , well architected , well intented , and community founded on the ground up.

https://starlite-api.github.io/starlite/

[luebke-dev]

Any updates on this?

[Yakabuff]

I will be switching to starlite; not because I think it's much better or that I even understand the difference between the two but because I fundamentally cannot trust an adult who uses emojis in every single commit

[luebke-dev]

I will be switching to starlite; not because I think it's much better or that I even understand the difference between the two but because I fundamentally cannot trust an adult who uses emojis in every single commit

Wtf 😂😂

[v3ss0n]

I will be switching to starlite; not because I think it's much better or that I even understand the difference between the two but because I fundamentally cannot trust an adult who uses emojis in every single commit

I had switched to starlite after 2 year of FastAPI , never being happier. Can use both FastAPI style and OO Style . The OO Style is a little hard to use to but it nicely separate your code into manageable controller classes , no more pile of mess of FastAPI when project getting bigger. The community (now have 6 maintainers) are very active, they are trying many innovative things like rust based routers and stuff.

[tiangolo]

Hello all! I updated the docs about helping FastAPI, there's a new section Help Maintain FastAPI.

The biggest work maintaining FastAPI can be done by any and all of you here. And that work is what demands the most time.

There are many more details about how to help maintain FastAPI, the specific tasks, and what YOU can do, right now.

So, please, come and help me maintain FastAPI! 💪 🤓

[github-actions[bot]]

Assuming the original need was handled, this will be automatically closed now. But feel free to add more comments or create new issues or PRs.

[v3ss0n]

Finally , community effort paid off !