rest-process-spawner

Example scenario of executing lengthy functions using python Rest APIs and processes.

Description

The server is written in FastAPI. But the idea works for FastAPI, flask alike. No async is used in this project.

Note: I was stuck for some case like this some time back, so putting it up on my page, in case anyone finds this helpful :D

Usage

Consider the scenario, where you need to run some method, which you know will take a long time to run, but you have nothing to do with its response / return. All you want to do is to run the method and be over with it. This project is a boilerplate of how that can be dealt with using a rest API and a process based approach. Checkout the file named router.py in both of the /create endpoint handlers you'll see that we're creating and starting a process and be done with it. It is a very simple implementation, in your case however it may be more complex, but hopefully you get the idea!

The "lengthy" function in our case is as follows:

def take_some_time(n: Optional[int]=10) -> None:
    time.sleep(n)
    return

You'll find this in the utils.py script. Good luck!

Installing the dependencies

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Starting the server

uvicorn app:app

Image: Endpoints in the application

As the server is running visit localhost:8000/docs to check out the endpoints.

Endpoint	Method	Description
/create	GET	Creates a process with a random value
/create	POST	Creates a process with given value in request body
/processes	GET	Get all processes and their details created by this API
/active	GET	Get all active processes
/kill	GET	Kill the most recent process
/kill_all	GET	Kill all active processes