Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface
Version | 3.0 |
---|---|
Developer | ASGI Team |
Release date | 2019-03-04[1] |
Website | asgi |
License | public domain[2] |
Status | Draft |
The Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface (ASGI) is a calling convention for web servers to forward requests to asynchronous-capable Python frameworks, and applications. It is built as a successor to the Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI).
Where WSGI provided a standard for synchronous Python application, ASGI provides one for both asynchronous and synchronous applications, with a WSGI backwards-compatibility implementation and multiple servers and application frameworks.
Example
An ASGI-compatible "Hello, World!" application written in Python:
async def application(scope, receive, send):
event = await receive()
...
await send({"type": "websocket.send", ...})
Where:
- Line 1 defines an asynchronous function named
application
, which takes three parameters (unlike in WSGI which takes only two),scope
,receive
andsend
.scope
is adict
containing details about current connection, like the protocol, headers, etc.receive
andsend
are asynchronous callables which let the application receive and send messages from/to the client.
- Line 2 receives an incoming event, for example, HTTP request or WebSocket message. The
await
keyword is used because the operation is asynchronous. - Line 4 asynchronously sends a response back to the client. In this case, it is a WebSocket communication.
Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) compatibility
ASGI is also designed to be a superset of WSGI, and there's a defined way of translating between the two, allowing WSGI applications to be run inside ASGI servers through a translation wrapper (provided in the asgiref library). A threadpool can be used to run the synchronous WSGI applications away from the async event loop.
See also
- Comparison of web frameworks
- FastCGI
- Python (programming language)
- Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI)
References
- ^ "Version History".
- ^ "Copyright". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-09-14.