How to store state in the app?

[chbndrhnns]

On startup, I'd like to store custom state inside the app (like settings) which is also available outside of the context of a request. How would I do that? I noticed that the mechanism from Starlette (via app.state) seems not to be available.

[FelixSchwarz]

Yes, I have basically the same question.

I think currently it boils down to storing that in a global symbol somewhere but that only works if the settings are immutable. Using connexion's scope could be another solution but that is only available after all middlewares did run (#1750).

[chrisinmtown]

Are you asking about static configuration that gets read at startup, or something else? My Connexion projects all use Flask, and all use the Flask configuration feature, basically slurp in a series of var = "value" assignments from a config.py file. My code plucks values out of that app config while processing requests by referencing the conn_app.app.config object, which supports a dict-like get operation.

Are you asking if you can change the contents of the config dict /after/ startup? I would have to try, I don't know if the Flask config object becomes immutable.

[chrisinmtown]

My code creates a connexion.FlaskApp, loads the config into the Flask app, and /then/ hooks the API spec.

One of my REST servers uses Connexion security with x-apikeyInfoFunc. Do any of those functions (security request handlers) access app config? I could check, but I sure don't see why it would be a problem.

[FelixSchwarz]

Not sure if I understood you correctly, but my problem was the following:

os.environ['APIKEYINFO_FUNC'] = 'my_pkg.auth.apikey_auth'
app = build_connexion_app(...)

...

def apikey_auth(provided_key, required_scopes, request):
    api_key = config.get('api_secret')

apikey_auth is via connexion.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware and that runs before the flask context is available - though I would love to be wrong.

[chrisinmtown]

Not at all sure I follow, it appears that you are assigning a Python pkg.module.function path to an environment variable? I suspect you are doing something far more sophisticated than I am, and my cookie-cutter examples are useless to you, sorry.

[FelixSchwarz]

Don't underestimate your advice :-)

The environment variable is strange indeed but is the only way described in the docs if you don't want to add the module reference in the public openapi yaml. So it is really not that advanced, just a somewhat ugly API.

[chrisinmtown]

Thanks for explaining. My open API spec uses multiple x-apikey functions (so a single env variable is not enough), and I don't mind exposing the pkg.module.function names.