hookery 3.0.0

Trivial, primitive, naive, and optimistic hooks in Python 3.5+.

pip install hookery

A hookable is something that one can hook into (onto, around, or about) using hooks. This something is usually an algorithm, a strategy of some sort; and hooks are points in the execution of this strategy at which the designer of the strategy allows user to monitor the execution of the strategy or to change it.

To hook into a strategy, user picks one of the hooks the strategy exposes and registers a handler for it. A handler is just a function. A hook may have zero, one or multiple handlers registered with it. When a hookable strategy is executed and the control of the program reaches a hooking point, the corresponding hook will be triggered, and through that all registered handler functions will be called and their results collected.

hookery provides a few flavours of hooks: global hooks, class hooks, and instance hooks.

Global hooks are the simplest -— they are just events in global scope that user can subscribe to (register handlers with) and can trigger from anywhere without any context. They don’t necessarily have to be global, but they are unless user manages the scope. For example, if your application had a global before_shutdown hook then handlers registered with it would be called for all applications.

A class hook is associated with a particular class. By default, a separate hook is generated automatically for every class derived from this class, however, the derived class hook inherits all handlers registered with the parent class’s corresponding hook. Attempt to trigger a class hook from an instance of the class raises TypeError. Class hooks are just hooks that use class they belong to as a namespace. When you create a new class with a hookable class as its base class, the new class will inherit all the handlers registered with hooks of the parent class.

An instance hook is also associated with a hookable class, but a separate instance-associated hook is auto-generated for each instance of this class. That way handlers can be registered separately with the class-associated hook (to affect all instances of the class) and with the instance-associated hook (to only affect the particular instance). Unlike with class hooks which are triggered against a particular class, an instance hook can only be triggered with a particular instance in context, triggering such hook on class will raise a TypeError. When such hook is triggered, all handlers registered with the class-associated hook will be called first and then all handlers for the instance-associated hook will be called.