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About arvel

arvel is a batteries-included, async-first web framework for Python. It gives you an expressive application layer — routing, an ORM, a queue, a cache, mail, validation, auth, and more — on a modern, fully type-safe foundation, without making you assemble a dozen libraries yourself.

Philosophy

  • Async-first. Every I/O path is async; blocking work is pushed to worker threads so the event loop stays responsive.
  • Type-safe, end to end. The whole package passes mypy --strict and pyright --strict with no blanket suppressions. Your editor knows what everything is.
  • Light to import. import arvel pulls in zero heavy third-party libraries — each engine is loaded lazily, the first time you actually use it.
  • A modular monolith. One deployable, cleanly separated modules, enforced import boundaries — the benefits of separation without the distributed-systems tax.
  • Convention over configuration. Sensible defaults, escape hatches when you need them.

Inspiration & prior art

arvel's developer experience is inspired by a mature PHP framework whose elegant, productive application layer set the bar for what a full-stack framework can feel like. arvel is an independent project — it shares none of that framework's code — but it owes its ergonomic sensibility to that design lineage, and we gratefully acknowledge it here.

Built on great open source

arvel is an application layer over a curated set of best-in-class libraries. We stand on the shoulders of these projects:

Capability Engine
HTTP / ASGI Litestar
ORM & SQL SQLAlchemy Core + Alembic
Validation & serialization msgspec
Dates & times whenever
Console Typer
Cache cashews
Storage fsspec
Mail aiosmtplib
Notifications Apprise
Templates Jinja2
Queue & scheduling taskiq
Full-text search Meilisearch
Password hashing pwdlib (Argon2)
Images / video Pillow / PyAV
Localization (CLDR) Babel

Thank you to every maintainer and contributor of these libraries.

License

arvel is open source under the MIT License.

Copyright (c) arvel contributors

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction …

See the LICENSE file in the repository for the full text.

See also

  • Get started — install arvel and build your first route.
  • Architecture — how the modular monolith and import boundaries fit together.