What is a Pythonic way for Dependency Injection?

Question

Introduction

For Java, Dependency Injection works as pure OOP, i.e. you provide an interface to be implemented and in your framework code accept an instance of a c

Answer 1

Some time ago I wrote dependency injection microframework with a ambition to make it Pythonic - Dependency Injector. That's how your code can look like in case of its usage:

"""Example of dependency injection in Python."""

import logging
import sqlite3

import boto.s3.connection

import example.main
import example.services

import dependency_injector.containers as containers
import dependency_injector.providers as providers


class Platform(containers.DeclarativeContainer):
    """IoC container of platform service providers."""

    logger = providers.Singleton(logging.Logger, name='example')

    database = providers.Singleton(sqlite3.connect, ':memory:')

    s3 = providers.Singleton(boto.s3.connection.S3Connection,
                             aws_access_key_id='KEY',
                             aws_secret_access_key='SECRET')


class Services(containers.DeclarativeContainer):
    """IoC container of business service providers."""

    users = providers.Factory(example.services.UsersService,
                              logger=Platform.logger,
                              db=Platform.database)

    auth = providers.Factory(example.services.AuthService,
                             logger=Platform.logger,
                             db=Platform.database,
                             token_ttl=3600)

    photos = providers.Factory(example.services.PhotosService,
                               logger=Platform.logger,
                               db=Platform.database,
                               s3=Platform.s3)


class Application(containers.DeclarativeContainer):
    """IoC container of application component providers."""

    main = providers.Callable(example.main.main,
                              users_service=Services.users,
                              auth_service=Services.auth,
                              photos_service=Services.photos)

Here is a link to more extensive description of this example - http://python-dependency-injector.ets-labs.org/examples/services_miniapp.html

Hope it can help a bit. For more information please visit:

• GitHub https://github.com/ets-labs/python-dependency-injector
• Docs http://python-dependency-injector.ets-labs.org/

Answer 2

I think that DI and possibly AOP are not generally considered Pythonic because of typical Python developers preferences, rather that language features.

As a matter of fact you can implement a basic DI framework in <100 lines, using metaclasses and class decorators.

For a less invasive solution, these constructs can be used to plug-in custom implementations into a generic framework.

Answer 3

A very easy and Pythonic way to do dependency injection is importlib.

You could define a small utility function

def inject_method_from_module(modulename, methodname):
    """
    injects dynamically a method in a module
    """
    mod = importlib.import_module(modulename)
    return getattr(mod, methodname, None)

And then you can use it:

myfunction = inject_method_from_module("mypackage.mymodule", "myfunction")
myfunction("a")

In mypackage/mymodule.py you define myfunction

def myfunction(s):
    print("myfunction in mypackage.mymodule called with parameter:", s)

You could of course also use a class MyClass iso. the function myfunction. If you define the values of methodname in a settings.py file you can load different versions of the methodname depending on the value of the settings file. Django is using such a scheme to define its database connection.