Introduction

Sanic is a micro web framework that is designed to be fast and easy to use. It is both a framework and a web server. Sanic comes with everything that you need to write, deploy, and scale a production grade web application.

Getting Started

Install Sanic

To install Sanic, run the following command:

pip install sanic

To teach you the basics of working with Sanic, we are going to build a simple web application that greets the world. Copy the following into a file called server.py.

Simple Web App

from sanic import Sanic, response

app = Sanic("hello-world-app")

@app.get("/")
async def hello(request):
    return response.text("Hello, world!")

It is important to note that the request object is always the first argument of your handler. Also, you are always required to state the response type. This is done at the expense of ease for the benefit of a faster reponse.

Now to run the server, we simply run the following command:

sanic server.app

The output that you get will look something like this:

[2022-05-27 09:39:13 -0400] [15506] [INFO]
  ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │                          Sanic v22.3.2                          │
  │                 Goin' Fast @ http://0.0.0.0:8000                │
  ├───────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │                       │     mode: debug, single worker          │
  │     ▄███ █████ ██     │   server: sanic                         │
  │    ██                 │   python: 3.9.12                        │
  │     ▀███████ ███▄     │ platform: macOS-10.16-x86_64-i386-64bit │
  │                 ██    │ packages: sanic-routing==22.3.0         │
  │    ████ ████████▀     │                                         │
  │                       │                                         │
  │ Build Fast. Run Fast. │                                         │
  └───────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────┘

[2022-05-27 09:39:13 -0400] [15506] [DEBUG] Dispatching signal: server.init.before
[2022-05-27 09:39:13 -0400] [15506] [DEBUG] Dispatching signal: server.init.after
[2022-05-27 09:39:13 -0400] [15506] [INFO] Starting worker [15506]

Our server is now open at http://localhost:8000/, to view it we can eith use curl or open the browser and navigate there to see the output.

Using Curl to View Output

curl http://localhost:8000/