Frequently Asked Questions#

How can I load external files in Pyodide?#

If you are using Pyodide in the browser, you should download external files and save them to the virtual file system. The recommended way to do this is to zip the files and unpack them into the file system with pyodide.unpackArchive:

let zipResponse = await fetch("myfiles.zip");
let zipBinary = await zipResponse.arrayBuffer();
pyodide.unpackArchive(zipBinary, "zip");

You can also download the files from Python using pyodide.http.pyfetch, which is a convenient wrapper of JavaScript fetch:

await pyodide.runPythonAsync(`
  from pyodide.http import pyfetch
  response = await pyfetch("https://some_url/myfiles.zip")
  await response.unpack_archive()
`)

If you are working in Node.js, you can mount a native folder into the file system as follows:

FS.mkdir("/local_directory");
FS.mount(NODEFS, { root: "some/local/filepath" }, "/local_directory");

Then you can access the mounted folder from Python via the /local_directory mount.

Why can’t I just use urllib or requests?

We currently can’t use such packages since sockets are not available in Pyodide. See Write http.client in terms of Web APIs for more information.

Why can’t I load files from the local file system?#

For security reasons JavaScript in the browser is not allowed to load local data files (for example, file:///path/to/local/file.data). You will run into Network Errors, due to the Same Origin Policy. There is a File System API supported in Chrome but not in Firefox or Safari.

For development purposes, you can serve your files with a web server.

How can I execute code in a custom namespace?#

The second argument to pyodide.runPython is an options object which may include a globals element which is a namespace for code to read from and write to. The provided namespace must be a Python dictionary.

let my_namespace = pyodide.globals.get("dict")();
pyodide.runPython(`x = 1 + 1`, { globals: my_namespace });
pyodide.runPython(`y = x ** x`, { globals: my_namespace });
my_namespace.get("y"); // ==> 4

You can also use this approach to inject variables from JavaScript into the Python namespace, for example:

let my_namespace = pyodide.toPy({ x: 2, y: [1, 2, 3] });
pyodide.runPython(
  `
  assert x == y[1]
  z = x ** x
  `,
  { globals: my_namespace }
);
my_namespace.get("z"); // ==> 4

How to detect that code is run with Pyodide?#

At run time, you can check if Python is built with Emscripten (which is the case for Pyodide) with,

import sys

if sys.platform == 'emscripten':
    # running in Pyodide or other Emscripten based build

To detect that a code is running with Pyodide specifically, you can check for the loaded pyodide module,

import sys

if "pyodide" in sys.modules:
   # running in Pyodide

This however will not work at build time (i.e. in a setup.py) due to the way the Pyodide build system works. It first compiles packages with the host compiler (e.g. gcc) and then re-runs the compilation commands with emsdk. So the setup.py is never run inside the Pyodide environment.

To detect Pyodide, at build time use,

import os

if "PYODIDE" in os.environ:
    # building for Pyodide

We used to use the environment variable PYODIDE_BASE_URL for this purpose, but this usage is deprecated.

How do I create custom Python packages from JavaScript?#

Put a collection of functions into a JavaScript object and use pyodide.registerJsModule: JavaScript:

let my_module = {
  f: function (x) {
    return x * x + 1;
  },
  g: function (x) {
    console.log(`Calling g on argument ${x}`);
    return x;
  },
  submodule: {
    h: function (x) {
      return x * x - 1;
    },
    c: 2,
  },
};
pyodide.registerJsModule("my_js_module", my_module);

You can import your package like a normal Python package:

import my_js_module
from my_js_module.submodule import h, c
assert my_js_module.f(7) == 50
assert h(9) == 80
assert c == 2

How can I send a Python object from my server to Pyodide?#

The best way to do this is with pickle. If the version of Python used in the server exactly matches the version of Python used in the client, then objects that can be successfully pickled can be sent to the client and unpickled in Pyodide. If the versions of Python are different then for instance sending AST is unlikely to work since there are breaking changes to Python AST in most Python minor versions.

Similarly when pickling Python objects defined in a Python package, the package version needs to match exactly between the server and pyodide.

Generally, pickles are portable between architectures (here amd64 and wasm32). The rare cases when they are not portable, for instance currently tree based models in scikit-learn, can be considered as a bug in the upstream library.

Security Issues with pickle

Unpickling data is similar to eval. On any public-facing server it is a really bad idea to unpickle any data sent from the client. For sending data from client to server, try some other serialization format like JSON.

How can I use a Python function as an event handler?#

Note that the most straight forward way of doing this will not work:

from js import document
def f(*args):
    document.querySelector("h1").innerHTML += "(>.<)"

document.body.addEventListener('click', f)

Now every time you click, an error will be raised (see Calling JavaScript functions from Python).

To do this correctly use pyodide.create_proxy() as follows:

from js import document
from pyodide import create_proxy
def f(*args):
    document.querySelector("h1").innerHTML += "(>.<)"

proxy_f = create_proxy(f)
document.body.addEventListener('click', proxy_f)
# Store proxy_f in Python then later:
document.body.removeEventListener('click', proxy_f)
proxy_f.destroy()

How can I use fetch with optional arguments from Python?#

The most obvious translation of the JavaScript code won’t work:

import json
resp = await js.fetch('/someurl', {
  "method": "POST",
  "body": json.dumps({ "some" : "json" }),
  "credentials": "same-origin",
  "headers": { "Content-Type": "application/json" }
})

The fetch API ignores the options that we attempted to provide. You can do this correctly in one of two ways:

import json
from pyodide.ffi import to_js
from js import Object
resp = await js.fetch('example.com/some_api',
  method= "POST",
  body= json.dumps({ "some" : "json" }),
  credentials= "same-origin",
  headers= Object.fromEntries(to_js({ "Content-Type": "application/json" })),
)

or:

import json
from pyodide.ffi import to_js
from js import Object
resp = await js.fetch('example.com/some_api', to_js({
  "method": "POST",
  "body": json.dumps({ "some" : "json" }),
  "credentials": "same-origin",
  "headers": { "Content-Type": "application/json" }
}, dict_converter=Object.fromEntries)

How can I control the behavior of stdin / stdout / stderr?#

If you wish to override stdin, stdout or stderr for the entire Pyodide runtime, you can pass options to loadPyodide: If you say

loadPyodide({
  stdin: stdin_func, stdout: stdout_func, stderr: stderr_func
});

then every time a line is written to stdout (resp. stderr), stdout_func (resp stderr_func) will be called on the line. Every time stdin is read, stdin_func will be called with zero arguments. It is expected to return a string which is interpreted as a line of text.

Temporary redirection works much the same as it does in native Python: you can overwrite sys.stdin, sys.stdout, and sys.stderr respectively. If you want to do it temporarily, it’s recommended to use contextlib.redirect_stdout and contextlib.redirect_stderr. There is no contextlib.redirect_stdin but it is easy to make your own as follows:

from contextlib import _RedirectStream
class redirect_stdin(_RedirectStream):
    _stream = "stdin"

For example, if you do:

from io import StringIO
with redirect_stdin(StringIO("\n".join(["eval", "asyncio.ensure_future", "functools.reduce", "quit"]))):
  help()

it will print:

Welcome to Python 3.10's help utility!
<...OMITTED LINES>
Help on built-in function eval in module builtins:
eval(source, globals=None, locals=None, /)
    Evaluate the given source in the context of globals and locals.
<...OMITTED LINES>
Help on function ensure_future in asyncio:
asyncio.ensure_future = ensure_future(coro_or_future, *, loop=None)
    Wrap a coroutine or an awaitable in a future.
<...OMITTED LINES>
Help on built-in function reduce in functools:
functools.reduce = reduce(...)
    reduce(function, sequence[, initial]) -> value
    Apply a function of two arguments cumulatively to the items of a sequence,
<...OMITTED LINES>
You are now leaving help and returning to the Python interpreter.

Micropip can’t find a pure Python wheel#

When installing a Python package from PyPI, micropip will produce an error if it cannot find a pure Python wheel. To determine if a package has a pure Python wheel manually, you can open its PyPi page (for instance https://pypi.org/project/snowballstemmer/) and go to the “Download files” tab. If this tab doesn’t contain a file *py3-none-any.whl then the pure Python wheel is missing.

This can happen for two reasons,

  1. either the package is pure Python (you can check language composition for a package on Github), and its maintainers didn’t upload a wheel. In this case, you can report this issue to the package issue tracker. As a temporary solution, you can also build the wheel yourself, upload it to some temporary location and install it with micropip from the corresponding URL.

  2. or the package has binary extensions (e.g. C, Fortran or Rust), in which case it needs to be packaged in Pyodide. Please open an issue after checking than an issue for this opackage doesn’t exist already. Then follow Creating a Pyodide package.

How can I change the behavior of runPython and runPythonAsync?#

You can directly call Python functions from JavaScript. For most purposes it makes sense to make your own Python function as an entrypoint and call that instead of redefining runPython. The definitions of runPython and runPythonAsync are very simple:

function runPython(code) {
  pyodide.pyodide_py.code.eval_code(code, pyodide.globals);
}
async function runPythonAsync(code) {
  return await pyodide.pyodide_py.code.eval_code_async(code, pyodide.globals);
}

To make your own version of runPython you could do:

const my_eval_code = pyodide.runPython(`
  from pyodide.code import eval_code
  def my_eval_code(code, ns):
    extra_info = None
    result = eval_code(code, ns)
    return ns["extra_info"], result
  my_eval_code
`)

function myRunPython(code){
  return my_eval_code(code, pyodide.globals);
}

Then myRunPython("2+7") returns [None, 9] and myRunPython("extra_info='hello' ; 2 + 2") returns ['hello', 4]. If you want to change which packages pyodide.loadPackagesFromImports loads, you can monkey patch pyodide.code.find_imports which takes code as an argument and returns a list of packages imported.