Web3 Internals

Warning

This section of the documentation is for advanced users. You should probably stay away from these APIs if you don’t know what you are doing.

The Web3 library has multiple layers of abstraction between the public api exposed by the web3 object and the backend or node that web3 is connecting to.

  • Providers are responsible for the actual communication with the blockchain such as sending JSON-RPC requests over HTTP or an IPC socket.
  • Middlewares provide hooks for monitoring and modifying requests and responses to and from the provider. These can be global operating on all providers or specific to one provider.
  • Managers provide thread safety and primatives to allow for asynchronous usage of web3.

Here are some common things you might want to do with these APIs.

  • Redirect certain RPC requests to different providers such as sending all read operations to a provider backed by Infura and all write operations to a go-ethereum node that you control.
  • Transparently intercept transactions sent over eth_sendTransaction, sign them locally, and then send them through eth_sendRawTransaction.
  • Modify the response from an RPC request so that it is returned in different format such as converting all integer values to their hexadecimal representation.
  • Validate the inputs to RPC requests

Request Lifecycle

Each web3 RPC call passes through these layers in the following manner.

  ***********    ************
  | Request |    | Response |
  ***********    ************
      |                ^
      v                |
+-----------------------------+
|            Manager          |
+-----------------------------+
      |                ^
      v                |
+-----------------------------+
|     Global Middlewares      |
+-----------------------------+
      |                ^
      v                |
+-----------------------------+
|    Provider Middlewares     |
+-----------------------------+
      |                ^
      v                |
+-----------------------------+
|          Provider           |
+-----------------------------+

You can visualize this relationship like an onion, with the Provider at the center. The request originates from the Manager, outside of the onion, passing down through each layer of the onion until it reaches the Provider at the center. The Provider then handles the request, producing a response which will then pass back out from the center of the onion, through each layer until it is finally returned by the Manager.

In the situation where web3 is operating with multiple providers the same lifecycle applies. The manager will iterate over each provider, returning the response from the first provider that returns a response.

Providers

A provider is responsible for all direct blockchain interactions. In most cases this means interacting with the JSON-RPC server for an ethereum node over HTTP or an IPC socket. There is however nothing which requires providers to be RPC based, allowing for providers designed for testing purposes which use an in-memory EVM to fulfill requests.

Writing your own Provider

Writing your own provider requires implementing two required methods as well as setting the middlewares the provider should use.

BaseProvider.make_request(method, params)

Each provider class must implement this method. This method should return a JSON object with either a 'result' key in the case of success, or an 'error' key in the case of failure.

  • method This will be a string representing the JSON-RPC method that is being called such as 'eth_sendTransaction'.
  • params This will be a list or other iterable of the parameters for the JSON-RPC method being called.
BaseProvider.is_connected()

This function should return True or False depending on whether the provider should be considered connected. For example, an IPC socket based provider should return True if the socket is open and False if the socket is closed.

BaseProvider.middlewares

This should be an iterable of middlewares.

You can set a new list of middlewares by assigning to provider.middlewares, with the first middleware that processes the request at the beginning of the list.

Middlewares

Note

The Middleware API in web3 borrows heavily from the Django middleware API introduced in version 1.10.0

Middlewares provide a simple yet powerful api for implementing layers of business logic for web3 requests. Writing middleware is simple.

def simple_middleware(make_request, w3):
    # do one-time setup operations here

    def middleware(method, params):
        # do pre-processing here

        # perform the RPC request, getting the response
        response = make_request(method, params)

        # do post-processing here

        # finally return the response
        return response
    return middleware

It is also possible to implement middlewares as a class.

class SimpleMiddleware:
    def __init__(self, make_request, w3):
        self.w3 = w3
        self.make_request = make_request

    def __call__(self, method, params):
        # do pre-processing here

        # perform the RPC request, getting the response
        response = self.make_request(method, params)

        # do post-processing here

        # finally return the response
        return response

The make_request parameter is a callable which takes two positional arguments, method and params which correspond to the RPC method that is being called. There is no requirement that the make_request function be called. For example, if you were writing a middleware which cached responses for certain methods your middleware would likely not call the make_request method, but instead get the response from some local cache.

By default, Web3 will use the web3.middleware.pythonic_middleware. This middleware performs the following translations for requests and responses.

  • Numeric request parameters will be converted to their hexadecimal representation
  • Numeric responses will be converted from their hexadecimal representations to their integer representations.

The RequestManager object exposes the middleware_onion object to manage middlewares. It is also exposed on the Web3 object for convenience. That API is detailed in Configuring Middleware.

Managers

The Manager acts as a gatekeeper for the request/response lifecycle. It is unlikely that you will need to change the Manager as most functionality can be implemented in the Middleware layer.