Cache and Session Library

About

Beaker is a web session and general caching library that includes WSGI middleware for use in web applications.

As a general caching library, Beaker can handle storing for various times any Python object that can be pickled with optional back-ends on a fine-grained basis.

Beaker was built largely on the code from MyghtyUtils, then refactored and extended with database support.

Beaker includes Cache and Session WSGI middleware to ease integration with WSGI capable frameworks, and is automatically used by Pylons and TurboGears.

Features

• Fast, robust performance
• Multiple reader/single writer lock system to avoid duplicate simultaneous cache creation
• Cache back-ends include dbm, file, memory, memcached, Redis, MongoDB, and database (Using SQLAlchemy for multiple-db vendor support)
• Signed cookies to prevent session hijacking/spoofing
• Cookie-only sessions to remove the need for a db or file backend (ideal for clustered systems)
• Extensible Container object to support new back-ends
• Caches can be divided into namespaces (to represent templates, objects, etc.) then keyed for different copies
• Create functions for automatic call-backs to create new cache copies after expiration
• Fine-grained toggling of back-ends, keys, and expiration per Cache object

Documentation

Documentation can be found on the Official Beaker Docs site.

To build the documentation locally with Python 3.12:

python -m venv /tmp/beaker-docs-env
. /tmp/beaker-docs-env/bin/activate
python -m pip install -r beaker/docs/requirements.txt
sphinx-build -b html -W beaker/docs build/docs/html
sphinx-build -M latexpdf beaker/docs build/docs -W

PDF builds also require LaTeX and latexmk. On Ubuntu, install latexmk texlive-latex-recommended texlive-latex-extra texlive-fonts-recommended. HTML output is in build/docs/html and the PDF is build/docs/latex/Beaker.pdf. The existing make html and make latex commands in beaker/docs remain available; after make latex, run make -C build/latex all-pdf there to compile the PDF.

Source

The latest developer version is available in a GitHub repository.

Contributing

Bugs can be filed on GitHub, should be accompanied by a test case to retain current code coverage, and should be in a pull request when ready to be accepted into the beaker code-base.