Reference

Consumers

When you configure channel routing, the object assigned to a channel should be a callable that takes exactly one positional argument, here called message, which is a message object. A consumer is any callable that fits this definition.

Consumers are not expected to return anything, and if they do, it will be ignored. They may raise channels.exceptions.ConsumeLater to re-insert their current message at the back of the channel it was on, but be aware you can only do this so many time (10 by default) until the message is dropped to avoid deadlocking.

Message

Message objects are what consumers get passed as their only argument. They encapsulate the basic ASGI message, which is a dict, with extra information. They have the following attributes:

  • content: The actual message content, as a dict. See the ASGI spec or protocol message definition document for how this is structured.

  • channel: A Channel object, representing the channel this message was received on. Useful if one consumer handles multiple channels.

  • reply_channel: A Channel object, representing the unique reply channel for this message, or None if there isn’t one.

  • channel_layer: A ChannelLayer object, representing the underlying channel layer this was received on. This can be useful in projects that have more than one layer to identify where to send messages the consumer generates (you can pass it to the constructor of Channel or Group)

Channel

Channel objects are a simple abstraction around ASGI channels, which by default are unicode strings. The constructor looks like this:

channels.Channel(name, alias=DEFAULT_CHANNEL_LAYER, channel_layer=None)

Normally, you’ll just call Channel("my.channel.name") and it’ll make the right thing, but if you’re in a project with multiple channel layers set up, you can pass in either the layer alias or the layer object and it’ll send onto that one instead. They have the following attributes:

  • name: The unicode string representing the channel name.

  • channel_layer: A ChannelLayer object, representing the underlying channel layer to send messages on.

  • send(content): Sends the dict provided as content over the channel. The content should conform to the relevant ASGI spec or protocol definition.

Group

Groups represent the underlying ASGI group concept in an object-oriented way. The constructor looks like this:

channels.Group(name, alias=DEFAULT_CHANNEL_LAYER, channel_layer=None)

Like Channel, you would usually just pass a name, but can pass a layer alias or object if you want to send on a non-default one. They have the following attributes:

  • name: The unicode string representing the group name.

  • channel_layer: A ChannelLayer object, representing the underlying channel layer to send messages on.

  • send(content): Sends the dict provided as content to all members of the group.

  • add(channel): Adds the given channel (as either a Channel object or a unicode string name) to the group. If the channel is already in the group, does nothing.

  • discard(channel): Removes the given channel (as either a Channel object or a unicode string name) from the group, if it’s in the group. Does nothing otherwise.

Channel Layer

These are a wrapper around the underlying ASGI channel layers that supplies a routing system that maps channels to consumers, as well as aliases to help distinguish different layers in a project with multiple layers.

You shouldn’t make these directly; instead, get them by alias (default is the default alias):

from channels import channel_layers
layer = channel_layers["default"]

They have the following attributes:

  • alias: The alias of this layer.

  • router: An object which represents the layer’s mapping of channels to consumers. Has the following attributes:

    • channels: The set of channels this router can handle, as unicode strings

    • match(message): Takes a Message and returns either a (consumer, kwargs) tuple specifying the consumer to run and the keyword argument to pass that were extracted via routing patterns, or None, meaning there’s no route available.

AsgiRequest

This is a subclass of django.http.HttpRequest that provides decoding from ASGI requests, and a few extra methods for ASGI-specific info. The constructor is:

channels.handler.AsgiRequest(message)

message must be an ASGI http.request format message.

Additional attributes are:

  • reply_channel, a Channel object that represents the http.response.? reply channel for this request.

  • message, the raw ASGI message passed in the constructor.

AsgiHandler

This is a class in channels.handler that’s designed to handle the workflow of HTTP requests via ASGI messages. You likely don’t need to interact with it directly, but there are two useful ways you can call it:

  • AsgiHandler(message) will process the message through the Django view layer and yield one or more response messages to send back to the client, encoded from the Django HttpResponse.

  • encode_response(response) is a classmethod that can be called with a Django HttpResponse and will yield one or more ASGI messages that are the encoded response.