1. Introduction

Thank you for choosing the often regarded number one Remote Method Invocation package for Python!

Pyro is short for PYthon Remote Objects. It is an advanced and powerful Distributed Object Technology system written entirely in Python, that is designed to be very easy to use. Never worry about writing network communication code again, when using Pyro you just write your Python objects like you would normally. With only a few lines of extra code, Pyro takes care of the network communication between your objects once you split them over different machines on the network. All the gory socket programming details are taken care of, you just call a method on a remote object as if it were a local object!

Pyro provides an object-oriented form of RPC. You can use Pyro within a single system but also use it for IPC. For those that are familiar with Java, Pyro resembles Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI). It is less similar to CORBA - which is a system- and language independent Distributed Object Technology and has much more to offer than Pyro or RMI. But Pyro is small, simple, fun and free!

Copyright and Disclaimer
This software is copyright © by Irmen de Jong. It is subject to change without notice. Pyro comes as-is, without warranty and in no event can Irmen de Jong be held liable for any problems resulting from this software. License: Pyro is released under the MIT license, see the file "LICENSE".

Security Warning
In the Security chapter is an important security warning that you absolutely must read!

Legacy version
Pyro 3.x is no longer maintained. New projects should use Pyro4 instead, which is the new Pyro version that is actively being developed.

Features of Pyro 3.x

To get an idea of how Pyro works, here is a scenario:

  1. You write a module 'test' containing a class 'testclass', which will be accessed remotely.
  2. The server creates one or more instances of the 'testclass', and registers them with the Pyro Name Server.
  3. The client queries the Name Server for the location of those objects. It gets a Pyro URI (Universal Resource Identifier) for them.
  4. The client creates proxies for the remote objects.
  5. Because the proxy mimics the real 'testclass', the client can now invoke methods on the remote objects. The proxy will forward the method invocations and return the results, just as if it was the remote object itself. Not a single line of network communication code has been written.
This looks like a big oversimplification, but it isn't!

To dive directly into the code, have a look at the various Pyro examples in the examples directory (read the Readme.txt). There is much to learn there. The easiest example to start with is the "simple" example, it shows how a normal python object is made into a Pyro object and accessed remotely from the client.

Required Software:

Important information Links

Related technology

Thanks

I want to thank everybody on the Pyro mailing list, your participation is of great value. And to everybody who contacted me about Pyro, for positive remarks, comments, or with problems (it all helps to improve Pyro): Thank You!