Dependencies

Introduction#

“Dependency Injection” means, in programming, that there is a way for your code (in this case, your path operation functions) to declare things that it requires to work and use: “dependencies”.

And then, that system will take care of doing whatever is needed to provide your code with those necessary dependencies (“inject” the dependencies).

This is invaluable when you need to:

• Have shared logic (the same code logic again and again).
• Share database connections.
• Enforce security, authentication, role requirements, etc.
• And many other things…

All these, while minimizing code repetition.

Function Dependency#

from typing import Annotated

from fastapi import APIRouter, Depends

router = APIRouter()

## Dependencies

async def common_parameters(q: str | None = None, skip: int = 0, limit: int = 100):
    return {"q": q, "skip": skip, "limit": limit}

CommonsDep = Annotated[dict, Depends(common_parameters)]

@router.get("/author")
async def author_get(commons: CommonsDep):
    return [{"author": id} for id in range(commons["skip"], commons["skip"] + commons["limit"])]

@router.get("/book")
async def book_get(commons: Annotated[dict, Depends(common_parameters)]):
    return [{"book": id} for id in range(commons["skip"], commons["skip"] + commons["limit"])]

Create a dependency, or “dependable”#

Our dependency it’s just the function common_parametersthat can take all the same parameters that a path operation function can take:

async def common_parameters(q: str | None = None, skip: int = 0, limit: int = 100):
    return {"q": q, "skip": skip, "limit": limit}

In this case, this dependency expects:

• An optional query parameter q that is a str.
• An optional query parameter skip that is an int, and by default is 0.
• An optional query parameter limit that is an int, and by default is 100.

And then it just returns a dict containing those values.

Declare the dependency, in the “dependant”#

The same way you use Body, Query, etc. with your path operation function parameters, use Depends with a new parameter:

@router.get("/author")
async def author_get(commons: Annotated[dict, Depends(common_parameters)]):
    return [{"author": id} for id in range(commons["skip"], commons["skip"] + commons["limit"])]

Although you use Depends in the parameters of your function the same way you use Body, Query, etc., Depends works a bit differently.

• You only give Depends a single parameter.
• This parameter must be something like a function.
• You don’t call it directly (don’t add the parenthesis at the end), you pass it as a parameter to Depends().
• And that function takes parameters in the same way that path operation functions do.

Whenever a new request arrives, FastAPI will take care of:

• Calling your dependency (“dependable”) function with the correct parameters.
• Get the result from your function.
• Assign that result to the parameter in your path operation function.