In the last projects that I’ve been involved with I’ve playing, in one way or another, with microservices, queues and things like that. I’m always facing the same tasks: Building RPCs, Workers, API gateways, … Because of that I’ve searching one framework to help me with those kind of stuff. Finally I discover Nameko. Basically Nameko is the Python tool that I’ve been looking for. In this post I will create a simple proof of concept to learn how to integrate Nameko within my projects. Let start.

The POC is a simple API gateway that gives me the localtime in iso format. I can create a simple Python script to do it

import datetime
import time

print(datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(time()).isoformat())

We also can create a simple Flask API server to consume this information. The idea is create a rpc worker to generate this information and also generate another worker to send the localtime, but taken from a PostgreSQL database (yes I know it not very useful but it’s just an excuse to use a PG database in the microservice)

We’re going to create two rpc workers. One giving the local time:

from nameko.rpc import rpc
from time import time
import datetime


class TimeService:
    name = "local_time_service"

    @rpc
    def local(self):
        return datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(time()).isoformat()

And another one with the date from PostgreSQL:

from nameko.rpc import rpc
from dotenv import load_dotenv
import os
from ext.pg import PgService

current_dir = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
load_dotenv(dotenv_path="{}/.env".format(current_dir))


class TimeService:
    name = "db_time_service"
    conn = PgService(os.getenv('DSN'))

    @rpc
    def db(self):
        with self.conn:
            with self.conn.cursor() as cur:
                cur.execute("select localtimestamp")
                timestamp = cur.fetchone()
        return timestamp[0]

I’ve created a service called PgService only to learn how to create dependency providers in nameko

from nameko.extensions import DependencyProvider
import psycopg2


class PgService(DependencyProvider):

    def __init__(self, dsn):
        self.dsn = dsn

    def get_dependency(self, worker_ctx):
        return psycopg2.connect(self.dsn)

Now we only need to setup the api gateway. With Nameko we can create http entrypoint also (in the same way than we create rpc) but I want to use it with Flask

from flask import Flask
from nameko.standalone.rpc import ServiceRpcProxy
from dotenv import load_dotenv
import os

current_dir = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
load_dotenv(dotenv_path="{}/.env".format(current_dir))

app = Flask(__name__)


def rpc_proxy(service):
    config = {'AMQP_URI': os.getenv('AMQP_URI')}
    return ServiceRpcProxy(service, config)


@app.route('/')
def hello():
    return "Hello"


@app.route('/local')
def local_time():
    with rpc_proxy('local_time_service') as rpc:
        time = rpc.local()

    return time


@app.route('/db')
def db_time():
    with rpc_proxy('db_time_service') as rpc:
        time = rpc.db()

    return time


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()

As well as I wanna run my POC with docker, here the docker-compose file to set up the project

version: '3.4'

services:
  api:
    image: nameko/api
    container_name: nameko.api
    hostname: api
    ports:
    - "8080:8080"
    restart: always
    links:
    - rabbit
    - db.worker
    - local.worker
    environment:
    - ENV=1
    - FLASK_APP=app.py
    - FLASK_DEBUG=1
    build:
      context: ./api
      dockerfile: .docker/Dockerfile-api
    #volumes:
    #- ./api:/usr/src/app:ro
    command: flask run --host=0.0.0.0 --port 8080
  db.worker:
    container_name: nameko.db.worker
    image: nameko/db.worker
    restart: always
    build:
      context: ./workers/db.worker
      dockerfile: .docker/Dockerfile-worker
    command: /bin/bash run.sh
  local.worker:
    container_name:  nameko.local.worker
    image: nameko/local.worker
    restart: always
    build:
      context: ./workers/local.worker
      dockerfile: .docker/Dockerfile-worker
    command: /bin/bash run.sh
  rabbit:
    container_name: nameko.rabbit
    image: rabbitmq:3-management
    restart: always
    ports:
    - "15672:15672"
    - "5672:5672"
    environment:
      RABBITMQ_ERLANG_COOKIE:
      RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_VHOST: /
      RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER: ${RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER}
      RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS: ${RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS}
  pg:
    container_name: nameko.pg
    image: nameko/pg
    restart: always
    build:
      context: ./pg
      dockerfile: .docker/Dockerfile-pg
    #ports:
    #- "5432:5432"
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}
      POSTGRES_USER: ${POSTGRES_USER}
      POSTGRES_DB: ${POSTGRES_DB}
      PGDATA: /var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata

And that’s all. Two nameko rpc services working together behind a api gateway

Code available in my github