Litestar library documentation#

Litestar is a powerful, flexible, highly performant and opinionated ASGI framework, offering first class typing support and a full Pydantic integration.

The Litestar framework supports Plugins, ships with dependency injection, security primitives, OpenAPI schema generation, MessagePack, middlewares and much more.

Installation#

pip install litestar

Minimal Example#

Define your data model using pydantic or any library based on it (for example ormar, beanie, SQLModel):

from pydantic import BaseModel, UUID4


class User(BaseModel):
    first_name: str
    last_name: str
    id: UUID4

You can also use dataclasses (standard library and Pydantic), typing.TypedDict or msgspec.Struct.

from uuid import UUID

# from pydantic.dataclasses import dataclass
from dataclasses import dataclass


@dataclass
class User:
    first_name: str
    last_name: str
    id: UUID

Define a Controller for your data model:

Python 3.8+

from typing import List

from pydantic import UUID4
from litestar import Controller, get, post, put, patch, delete
from litestar.partial import Partial
from my_app.models import User


class UserController(Controller):
    path = "/users"

    @post()
    async def create_user(self, data: User) -> User:
        ...

    @get()
    async def list_users(self) -> List[User]:
        ...

    @patch(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
    async def partial_update_user(self, user_id: UUID4, data: Partial[User]) -> User:
        ...

    @put(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
    async def update_user(self, user_id: UUID4, data: User) -> User:
        ...

    @get(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
    async def get_user(self, user_id: UUID4) -> User:
        ...

    @delete(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
    async def delete_user(self, user_id: UUID4) -> None:
        ...

Python 3.9+

from pydantic import UUID4
from litestar import Controller, get, post, put, patch, delete
from litestar.partial import Partial
from my_app.models import User


class UserController(Controller):
    path = "/users"

    @post()
    async def create_user(self, data: User) -> User:
        ...

    @get()
    async def list_users(self) -> list[User]:
        ...

    @patch(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
    async def partial_update_user(self, user_id: UUID4, data: Partial[User]) -> User:
        ...

    @put(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
    async def update_user(self, user_id: UUID4, data: User) -> User:
        ...

    @get(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
    async def get_user(self, user_id: UUID4) -> User:
        ...

    @delete(path="/{user_id:uuid}")
    async def delete_user(self, user_id: UUID4) -> None:
        ...

When instantiating your app, import your controller into your application’s entry-point and pass it to Litestar:

from litestar import Litestar

from my_app.controllers.user import UserController

app = Litestar(route_handlers=[UserController])

To run your application, use an ASGI server such as uvicorn :

uvicorn my_app.main:app --reload

Philosophy#

Litestar is a community-driven project. This means not a single author, but rather a core team of maintainers is leading the project, supported by a community of contributors. Litestar currently has 5 maintainers and is being very actively developed.
Litestar draws inspiration from NestJS - a contemporary TypeScript framework - which places opinions and patterns at its core.
While still allowing for function-based endpoints, Litestar seeks to build on Python’s powerful and versatile OOP, by placing class-based controllers at its core.
Litestar is not a microframework. Unlike frameworks such as FastAPI, Starlette or Flask, Litestar includes a lot of functionalities out of the box needed for a typical modern web application, such as ORM integration, client- and server-side sessions, caching, OpenTelemetry integration and many more. It’s not aiming to be “the next Django” (for example, it will never feature its own ORM), but its scope is not micro either.

Feature comparison with similar frameworks#

	Litestar	FastAPI	Starlette	Sanic	Quart
OpenAPI
Automatic API documentation	Swagger, ReDoc, Stoplight Elements	Swagger, ReDoc
Data validation
Dependency Injection
Class based routing		(Through extension)
ORM integration	SQLAlchemy, Tortoise, Piccolo				(Through extension)
Templating	Jinja, Mako	Jinja	Jinja	Jinja	Jinja
MessagePack
CORS					(Through extension)
CSRF
Rate-limiting				(Through extension)
JWT
Sessions		Client-side	Client-side		Client-side
Authentication	JWT / Session based
Caching

Example Applications#

litestar-pg-redis-docker : In addition to Litestar, this demonstrates a pattern of application modularity, SQLAlchemy 2.0 ORM, Redis cache connectivity, and more. Like all Litestar projects, this application is open to contributions, big and small.
litestar-hello-world: A bare-minimum application setup. Great for testing and POC work.