Is there a simple, elegant way to define singletons? [duplicate]

Answer 1

See this implementation from PEP318, implementing the singleton pattern with a decorator:

def singleton(cls):
    instances = {}
    def getinstance():
        if cls not in instances:
            instances[cls] = cls()
        return instances[cls]
    return getinstance

@singleton
class MyClass:
    ...

Answer 2

The Python documentation does cover this:

class Singleton(object):
    def __new__(cls, *args, **kwds):
        it = cls.__dict__.get("__it__")
        if it is not None:
            return it
        cls.__it__ = it = object.__new__(cls)
        it.init(*args, **kwds)
        return it
    def init(self, *args, **kwds):
        pass

I would probably rewrite it to look more like this:

class Singleton(object):
    """Use to create a singleton"""
    def __new__(cls, *args, **kwds):
        """
        >>> s = Singleton()
        >>> p = Singleton()
        >>> id(s) == id(p)
        True
        """
        self = "__self__"
        if not hasattr(cls, self):
            instance = object.__new__(cls)
            instance.init(*args, **kwds)
            setattr(cls, self, instance)
        return getattr(cls, self)

    def init(self, *args, **kwds):
        pass

It should be relatively clean to extend this:

class Bus(Singleton):
    def init(self, label=None, *args, **kwds):
        self.label = label
        self.channels = [Channel("system"), Channel("app")]
        ...

Answer 3

The one time I wrote a singleton in Python I used a class where all the member functions had the classmethod decorator.

class foo:
  x = 1

  @classmethod
  def increment(cls, y = 1):
    cls.x += y

Answer 4

My simple solution which is based on the default value of function parameters.

def getSystemContext(contextObjList=[]):
    if len( contextObjList ) == 0:
        contextObjList.append( Context() )
        pass
    return contextObjList[0]

class Context(object):
    # Anything you want here

Answer 5

I'm very unsure about this, but my project uses 'convention singletons' (not enforced singletons), that is, if I have a class called DataController, I define this in the same module:

_data_controller = None
def GetDataController():
    global _data_controller
    if _data_controller is None:
        _data_controller = DataController()
    return _data_controller

It is not elegant, since it's a full six lines. But all my singletons use this pattern, and it's at least very explicit (which is pythonic).

Answer 6

In cases where you don't want the metaclass-based solution above, and you don't like the simple function decorator-based approach (e.g. because in that case static methods on the singleton class won't work), this compromise works:

class singleton(object):
  """Singleton decorator."""

  def __init__(self, cls):
      self.__dict__['cls'] = cls

  instances = {}

  def __call__(self):
      if self.cls not in self.instances:
          self.instances[self.cls] = self.cls()
      return self.instances[self.cls]

  def __getattr__(self, attr):
      return getattr(self.__dict__['cls'], attr)

  def __setattr__(self, attr, value):
      return setattr(self.__dict__['cls'], attr, value)