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Primer on Python Decorators – Real Python

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Python Decorators 101

Python decorators allow you to modify or extend the behavior of functions and methods without changing their actual code. When you use a Python decorator, you wrap a function with another function, which takes the original function as an argument and returns its modified version. This technique provides a simple way to implement higher-order functions in Python, enhancing code reusability and readability.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand that:

• Practical use cases for decorators include logging, enforcing access control, caching results, and measuring execution time.
• Custom decorators are written by defining a function that takes another function as an argument, defines a nested wrapper function, and returns the wrapper.
• Multiple decorators can be applied to a single function by stacking them before the function definition.
• The order of decorators impacts the final output since each decorator wraps the next, influencing the behavior of the decorated function.

You can find all the examples from this tutorial by downloading the accompanying materials below:

Get Your Code: Click here to download the free sample code that shows you how to create and use Python decorators.

Free Bonus: Click here to get access to a free "The Power of Python Decorators" guide that shows you three advanced decorator patterns and techniques you can use to write cleaner and more Pythonic programs.

Decorators Cheat Sheet: Click here to get access to a free three-page Python decorators cheat sheet that summarizes the techniques explained in this tutorial.

Decorators Q&A Transcript: Click here to get access to a 25-page chat log from our Python decorators Q&A session in the Real Python Community Slack where we discussed common decorator questions.

Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our interactive “Decorators” quiz. You’ll receive a score upon completion to help you track your learning progress:

Interactive Quiz

In this quiz, you'll revisit the foundational concepts of what Python decorators are and how to create and use them.

In order to understand decorators, you must first understand some finer points of how functions work. There are many aspects to functions, but in the context of decorators, a function returns a value based on the given arguments. Here’s a basic example:

In general, functions in Python may also have side effects rather than just turning an input into an output. The print() function is an example of this: it returns None while having the side effect of outputting something to the console. However, to understand decorators, it’s enough to think about functions as tools that turn given arguments into values.

In functional programming, you work almost entirely with pure functions that don’t have side effects. While not a purely functional language, Python supports many functional programming concepts, including treating functions as first-class objects.

This means that functions can be passed around and used as arguments, just like any other object like str, int, float, list, and so on. Consider the following three functions:

Here, say_hello() and be_awesome() are regular functions that expect a name given as a string. The greet_bob() function, however, expects a function as its argument. You can, for example, pass it the say_hello() or the be_awesome() function.

To test your functions, you can run your code in interactive mode. You do this with the -i flag. For example, if your code is in a file named greeters.py, then you run python -i greeters.py:

Note that greet_bob(say_hello) refers to two functions, greet_bob() and say_hello, but in different ways. The say_hello function is named without parentheses. This means that only a reference to the function is passed. The function isn’t executed. The greet_bob() function, on the other hand, is written with parentheses, so it will be called as usual.

This is an important distinction that’s crucial for how functions work as first-class objects. A function name without parentheses is a reference to a function, while a function name with trailing parentheses calls the function and refers to its return value.

It’s possible to define functions inside other functions. Such functions are called inner functions. Here’s an example of a function with two inner functions:

What happens when you call the parent() function? Think about this for a minute. Then run inner_functions.py in interactive mode to try it out. The output will be as follows:

Note that the order in which the inner functions are defined does not matter. Like with any other functions, the printing only happens when the inner functions are executed.

Furthermore, the inner functions aren’t defined until the parent function is called. They’re locally scoped to parent(), meaning they only exist inside the parent() function as local variables. Try calling first_child(). You’ll get an error:

Whenever you call parent(), the inner functions first_child() and second_child() are also called. But because of their local scope, they aren’t available outside of the parent() function.

Python also allows you to return functions from functions. In the following example, you rewrite parent() to return one of the inner functions:

Note that you’re returning first_child without the parentheses. Recall that this means that you’re returning a reference to the function first_child. In contrast, first_child() with parentheses refers to the result of evaluating the function. You can see this in the following example:

The somewhat cryptic output means that the first variable refers to the local first_child() function inside of parent(), while second points to second_child().

You can now use first and second as if they’re regular functions, even though you can’t directly access the functions they point to:

You recognize the return values of the inner functions that you defined inside of parent().

Finally, note that in the earlier example, you executed the inner functions within the parent function—for example, first_child(). However, in this last example, you didn’t add parentheses to the inner functions, such as first_child, upon returning. That way, you got a reference to each function that you could call in the future.

Now that you’ve seen that functions are just like any other object in Python, you’re ready to move on and see the magical beast that is the Python decorator. You’ll start with an example:

Here, you’ve defined two regular functions, decorator() and say_whee(), and one inner wrapper() function. Then you redefined say_whee() to apply decorator() to the original say_whee().

Can you guess what happens when you call say_whee()? Try it in a REPL. Instead of running the file with the -i flag, you can also import the function manually:

To understand what’s going on here, look back at the earlier examples. You’re applying everything that you’ve learned so far.

The so-called decoration happens at the following line:

In effect, the name say_whee now points to the wrapper() inner function. Remember that you return wrapper as a function when you call decorator(say_whee):

However, wrapper() has a reference to the original say_whee() as func, and it calls that function between the two calls to print().

Put simply, a decorator wraps a function, modifying its behavior.

Before moving on, have a look at a second example. Because wrapper() is a regular Python function, the way a decorator modifies a function can change dynamically. So as not to disturb your neighbors, the following example will only run the decorated code during the day:

If you try to call say_whee() after bedtime, nothing will happen:

Here, say_whee() doesn’t print any output. That’s because the if test failed, so the wrapper didn’t call func(), the original say_whee().

Look back at the code that you wrote in hello_decorator.py. The way you decorated say_whee() is a little clunky. First of all, you end up typing the name say_whee three times. Additionally, the decoration gets hidden away below the definition of the function.

Instead, Python allows you to use decorators in a simpler way with the @ symbol, sometimes called the pie syntax. The following example does the exact same thing as the first decorator example:

So, @decorator is just a shorter way of saying say_whee = decorator(say_whee). It’s how you apply a decorator to a function.

Recall that a decorator is just a regular Python function. All the usual tools for reusability are available. Now, you’ll create a module where you store your decorators and that you can use in many other functions.

Create a file called decorators.py with the following content:

The do_twice() decorator calls the decorated function twice. You’ll soon see the effect of this in several examples.

Note: You can name your inner function whatever you want, and a generic name like wrapper() is usually okay. You’ll see a lot of decorators in this tutorial. To keep them apart, you’ll name the inner function with the same name as the decorator but with a wrapper_ prefix.

You can now use this new decorator in other files by doing a regular import:

When you run this example, you should see that the original say_whee() is executed twice:

There are two Whee! exclamations printed, confirming that @do_twice does what it says on the tin.

Free Bonus: Click here to get access to a free "The Power of Python Decorators" guide that shows you three advanced decorator patterns and techniques you can use to write cleaner and more Pythonic programs.

Say that you have a function that accepts some arguments. Can you still decorate it? Give it a try:

You now apply @do_twice to greet(), which expects a name. Unfortunately, calling this function raises an error:

The problem is that the inner function wrapper_do_twice() doesn’t take any arguments, but you passed name="World" to it. You could fix this by letting wrapper_do_twice() accept one argument, but then it wouldn’t work for the say_whee() function that you created earlier.

The solution is to use *args and **kwargs in the inner wrapper function. Then it’ll accept an arbitrary number of positional and keyword arguments. Rewrite decorators.py as follows:

The wrapper_do_twice() inner function now accepts any number of arguments and passes them on to the function that it decorates. Now both your say_whee() and greet() examples work. Start a fresh REPL:

You use the same decorator, @do_twice, to decorate two different functions. This hints at one of the powers of decorators. They add behavior that can apply to many different functions.

What happens to the return value of decorated functions? Well, that’s up to the decorator to decide. Say you decorate a simple function as follows:

Try to use it:

Oops, your decorator ate the return value from the function.

Because the do_twice_wrapper() doesn’t explicitly return a value, the call return_greeting("Adam") ends up returning None.

To fix this, you need to make sure the wrapper function returns the return value of the decorated function. Change your decorators.py file:

Now you return the return value of the last call of the decorated function. Check out the example again:

This time, return_greeting() returns the greeting 'Hi Adam'.

A great convenience when working with Python, especially in the interactive shell, is its powerful introspection ability. Introspection is the ability of an object to know about its own attributes at runtime. For instance, a function knows its own name and documentation:

When you inspect print(), you can see its name and documentation. The introspection works for functions that you define yourself as well:

However, after being decorated, say_whee() has gotten very confused about its identity. It now reports being the wrapper_do_twice() inner function inside the do_twice() decorator. Although technically true, this isn’t very useful information.

To fix this, decorators should use the @functools.wraps decorator, which will preserve information about the original function. Update decorators.py again:

You don’t need to change anything about the decorated say_whee() function, but you need to restart your REPL to see the effect:

Much better! Now say_whee() is still itself after decoration.

Note: The @functools.wraps decorator uses functools.update_wrapper() to update special attributes like __name__ and __doc__ that are used in the introspection.

You’ve now learned the basics of how to create a decorator. However, @do_twice isn’t a very exciting decorator, and there aren’t a lot of use cases for it. In the next section, you’ll implement several decorators that illustrate what you know so far and that you can use in your own code.

You’ll now look at a few more useful examples of decorators. You’ll notice that they’ll mainly follow the same pattern that you’ve learned so far:

This formula is a good boilerplate template for building more complex decorators.

You’ll continue to store your decorators in decorators.py. Recall that you can download all the examples in this tutorial:

Get Your Code: Click here to download the free sample code that shows you how to create and use Python decorators.

You’ll start by creating a @timer decorator. It’ll measure the time a function takes to execute and then print the duration to the console. Here’s the code:

This decorator works by storing the time just before the function starts running in line 10 and just after the function finishes in line 12. The runtime of the function is then the difference between the two, calculated in line 13. You use time.perf_counter(), which does a good job of measuring time intervals.

Now, add waste_some_time() as an example of a function that spends some time, so that you can test @timer. Here are some examples of timings:

Run it yourself. Work through the definition of @timer line by line. Make sure you understand how it works. Don’t worry if you don’t get everything, though. Decorators are advanced beings. Try to sleep on it or make a drawing of the program flow.

Note: The @timer decorator is great if you just want to get an idea about the runtime of your functions. If you want to do more precise measurements of code, then you should instead consider the timeit module in the standard library. It temporarily disables garbage collection and runs multiple trials to strip out noise from short function calls.

If you’re interested in learning more about timing functions, then have a look at Python Timer Functions: Three Ways to Monitor Your Code.

The following @debug decorator will print a function’s arguments and its return value every time you call the function:

The signature is created by joining the string representations of all the argument:

• Line 9: You create a list of the positional arguments. Use repr() to get a nice string representing each argument.
• Line 10: You create a list of the keyword arguments. The f-string formats each argument as key=value, and again, you use repr() to represent the value.
• Line 11: You join together the lists of positional and keyword arguments to one signature string with each argument separated by a comma.
• Line 14: You print the return value after the function is executed.

It’s time to see how the decorator works in practice by applying it to a simple function with one positional and one keyword argument:

Note how the @debug decorator prints the signature and return value of the make_greeting() function:

This example might not seem immediately useful since the @debug decorator just repeats what you wrote. It’s more powerful when applied to small convenience functions that you don’t call directly yourself.

The following example calculates an approximation of the mathematical constant e:

Here, you also apply a decorator to a function that has already been defined. In line 4, you decorate factorial() from the math standard library. You can’t use the pie syntax, but you can still manually apply the decorator. The approximation of e is based on the following series expansion:

When calling the approximate_e() function, you can see the @debug decorator at work:

In this example, you get a decent approximation of the true value e ≈ 2.718281828, adding only five terms.

In this section, you’ll create a decorator that slows down your code. This might not seem very useful. Why would you want to slow down your Python code?

Probably the most common use case is that you want to rate-limit a function that continuously checks whether a resource—like a web page—has changed. The @slow_down decorator will sleep one second before it calls the decorated function:

In @slow_down, you call time.sleep() to have your code take a pause before calling the decorated function. To see how the @slow_down decorator works, you create a countdown() function. To see the effect of slowing down the code, you should run the example yourself:

In countdown(), you check if from_number is smaller than one. In that case, you print Liftoff!. If not, then you print the number and keep counting.

Note: The countdown() function is a recursive function. In other words, it’s a function calling itself. To learn more about recursive functions in Python, see Thinking Recursively in Python.

The @slow_down decorator always sleeps for one second. Later, you’ll see how to control the rate by passing an argument to the decorator.

Decorators don’t have to wrap the function that they’re decorating. They can also simply register that a function exists and return it unwrapped. You can use this, for example, to create a lightweight plugin architecture:

The @register decorator only stores a reference to the decorated function in the global PLUGINS dictionary. Note that you don’t have to write an inner function or use @functools.wraps in this example because you’re returning the original function unmodified.

You can now register functions as follows:

Note that the PLUGINS dictionary already contains references to each function object that’s registered as a plugin:

Python applies decorators when you define a function, so say_hello() and be_awesome() are immediately registered. You can then use PLUGINS to call these functions:

The randomly_greet() function randomly chooses one of the registered functions to use. In the f-string, you use the !r flag. This has the same effect as calling repr(greeter).

The main benefit of this simple plugin architecture is that you don’t need to maintain a list of which plugins exist. That list is created when the plugins register themselves. This makes it trivial to add a new plugin: just define the function and decorate it with @register.

If you’re familiar with globals() in Python, then you might see some similarities to how the plugin architecture works. With globals(), you get access to all global variables in the current scope, including your plugins:

Using the @register decorator, you can create your own curated list of interesting names, effectively hand-picking some functions from globals().

The final example before moving on to some fancier decorators is commonly used when working with a web framework. In this example, you’ll use Flask to set up a /secret web page that should only be visible to users that are logged in or otherwise authenticated:

While this gives an idea about how to add authentication to your web framework, you should usually not write these types of decorators yourself. For Flask, you can use the Flask-Login extension instead, which adds more security and functionality.

So far, you’ve seen how to create simple decorators. You already have a pretty good understanding of what decorators are and how they work. Feel free to take a break from this tutorial to practice everything that you’ve learned.

In the second part of this tutorial, you’ll explore more advanced features, including how to do the following:

• Add decorators to classes
• Add several decorators to one function
• Create decorators with arguments
• Create decorators that can optionally take arguments
• Define stateful decorators
• Define classes that act as decorators

Ready to dive in? Here you go!

There are two different ways that you can use decorators on classes. The first one is very close to what you’ve already done with functions: you can decorate the methods of a class. This was one of the motivations for introducing decorators back in the day.

Some commonly used decorators are even built-ins in Python, including @classmethod, @staticmethod, and @property. The @classmethod and @staticmethod decorators are used to define methods inside a class namespace that aren’t connected to a particular instance of that class. The @property decorator is used to customize getters and setters for class attributes. Expand the box below for an example using these decorators:

The following definition of a Circle class uses the @classmethod, @staticmethod, and @property decorators:

Inside Circle you can see several different kinds of methods. Decorators are used to distinguish them:

• .cylinder_volume() is a regular method.
• .radius is a mutable property. It can be set to a different value. However, by defining a setter method, you do some error testing to make sure .radius isn’t set to a nonsensical negative number. Properties are accessed as attributes without parentheses.
• .area is an immutable property. Properties without .setter() methods can’t be changed. Even though it’s defined as a method, it can be retrieved as an attribute without parentheses.
• .unit_circle() is a class method. It’s not bound to one particular instance of Circle. Class methods are often used as factory methods that can create specific instances of the class.
• .pi() is a static method. It’s not really dependent on the Circle class, except that it’s part of its namespace. You can call static methods on either an instance or the class.

You can use Circle as follows:

In these examples, you explore the different methods, attributes, and properties of Circle.

Next, define a class where you decorate some of its methods using the @debug and @timer decorators from earlier:

Using this class, you can see the effect of the decorators:

When you create a new instance of TimeWaster, Python calls .__init__() under the hood, as your use of @debug reveals. The @timer decorator helps you monitor how much time is spent on .waste_time().

The other way to use decorators on classes is to decorate the whole class. This is, for example, done in the dataclasses module:

The meaning of the syntax is similar to the function decorators. In the example above, you could’ve decorated the class by writing PlayingCard = dataclass(PlayingCard).

A common use of class decorators is to be a simpler alternative to some use cases of metaclasses. In both cases, you’re changing the definition of a class dynamically.

Writing a class decorator is very similar to writing a function decorator. The only difference is that the decorator will receive a class and not a function as an argument. In fact, all the decorators that you saw above will work as class decorators. When you’re using them on a class instead of a function, their effect might not be what you want. In the following example, the @timer decorator is applied to a class:

Decorating a class doesn’t decorate its methods. Recall that @timer is just shorthand for TimeWaster = timer(TimeWaster). Here, @timer only measures the time that it takes to instantiate the class:

The output from @timer is only shown as tw is created. The call to .waste_time() isn’t timed.

Later, you’ll see an example defining a proper class decorator, namely @singleton, which ensures that there’s only one instance of a class.

You can apply several decorators to a function at once by stacking them on top of each other:

Think about this as the decorators being executed in the order they’re listed. In other words, @debug calls @do_twice, which calls greet(), or debug(do_twice(greet())):

The greeting is printed twice because of @do_twice. However, the output from @debug is only shown once, since it’s called before the @do_twice decorator. Observe the difference if you change the order of @debug and @do_twice:

Here, @do_twice is applied to @debug as well. You can see that both calls to greet() are annotated with debugging information.

Sometimes, it’s useful to pass arguments to your decorators. For instance, @do_twice could be extended to a @repeat(num_times) decorator. The number of times to execute the decorated function could then be given as an argument.

If you define @repeat, you could do something like this:

Think about how you’d implement @repeat.

So far, the name written after the @ has referred to a function object that can be called with another function. To be consistent, you then need repeat(num_times=4) to return a function object that can act as a decorator. Luckily, you already know how to return functions! In general, you want something like the following:

Typically, the decorator creates and returns an inner wrapper function, so writing the example out in full will give you an inner function within an inner function. While this might sound like the programming equivalent of the Inception, you’ll untangle it all in a moment:

It looks a little messy, but you’ve only put the same decorator pattern that you’ve seen many times by now inside one additional def that handles the arguments to the decorator. First, consider the innermost function:

This wrapper_repeat() function takes arbitrary arguments and returns the value of the decorated function, func(). This wrapper function also contains the loop that calls the decorated function num_times times. This is no different from the earlier wrapper functions that you’ve seen, except that it’s using the num_times parameter that must be supplied from the outside.

One step out, you’ll find the decorator function:

Again, decorator_repeat() looks exactly like the decorator functions that you’ve written earlier, except that it’s named differently. That’s because you reserve the base name—repeat()—for the outermost function, which is the one the user will call.

As you’ve already seen, the outermost function returns a reference to the decorator function:

There are a few subtle things happening in the repeat() function:

• Defining decorator_repeat() as an inner function means that repeat() will refer to a function object, decorator_repeat. Earlier, you used decorators like @do_twice without parentheses. Now, you need to add parentheses when setting up the decorator, as in @repeat(). This is necessary in order to add arguments.
• The num_times argument is seemingly not used in repeat() itself. But by passing num_times, a closure is created where the value of num_times is stored until wrapper_repeat() uses it later.

With everything set up, test your code to see if the results are as expected:

That’s just the result that you were aiming for.

With a little bit of care, you can also define decorators that can be used both with and without arguments. Most likely, you don’t need this, but it is nice to have the flexibility. Like Winnie-the-Pooh says:

Both—but don’t bother about the bread, please. (Source)

As you saw in the previous section, when a decorator uses arguments, you need to add an extra outer function. The challenge now is for your code to figure out if you’ve called the decorator with or without arguments.

Since the function to decorate is only passed in directly if the decorator is called without arguments, the function must be an optional argument. This means that the decorator arguments must all be specified by keyword. You can enforce this with the special asterisk (*) syntax, which means that all the following parameters are keyword-only:

Here, the _func argument acts as a marker, noting whether the decorator has been called with arguments or not:

• Line 1: If you’ve called @name without arguments, then the decorated function will be passed in as _func. If you’ve called it with arguments, then _func will be None, and some of the keyword arguments may have been changed from their default values. The asterisk in the argument list means that you can’t call the remaining arguments as positional arguments.
• Line 6: In this case, you called the decorator with arguments. Return a decorator function that takes a function as an argument and returns a wrapper function.
• Line 8: In this case, you called the decorator without arguments. Apply the decorator to the function immediately.

Using this boilerplate on the @repeat decorator in the previous section, you can write the following:

Compare this with the original @repeat. The only changes are the added _func parameter and the if…else block at the end.

Recipe 9.6 of the excellent Python Cookbook shows an alternative solution using functools.partial().

You can now apply @repeat to different functions to test that you can now use it with or without arguments:

Recall that the default value of num_times is 2, so using @repeat without any arguments is equivalent to using @do_twice:

Here, Whee! is repeated twice since that’s the default behavior of @repeat. As specified by the argument, the greeting is repeated three times.

Sometimes, it’s useful to have a decorator that can keep track of state. As an example, you’ll create a decorator that counts the number of times a function is called.

Note: In the beginning of this guide, you learned about pure functions returning a value based on given arguments. Stateful decorators are quite the opposite, where the return value will depend on the current state, as well as the given arguments.

In the next section, you’ll see how to use classes to keep state. But in simple cases, you can also get away with using function attributes:

The state—the number of calls to the function—is stored in the function attribute .num_calls on the wrapper function. Here’s the effect of using it:

You apply @count_calls to your old friend, say_whee(). Each time you call the function, you see that the call count increases. You can also manually query the .num_calls attribute.

The typical way to maintain state in Python is by using classes. In this section, you’ll see how to rewrite the @count_calls example from the previous section to use a class as a decorator.

Recall that the decorator syntax @decorator is just a quicker way of saying func = decorator(func). Therefore, if decorator is a class, it needs to take func as an argument in its .__init__() initializer. Furthermore, the class instance needs to be callable so that it can stand in for the decorated function.

Note: Up until now, all the decorators that you’ve seen have been defined as functions. This is how you most often will create decorators. However, you can use any callable expression as a decorator.

For a class instance to be callable, you implement the special .__call__() method:

The .__call__() method is executed each time you try to call an instance of the class:

Each time you call counter(), the state changes as the count increases. Therefore, a typical implementation of a decorator class should implement .__init__() and .__call__():

The .__init__() method must store a reference to the function, and it can do any other necessary initialization. The .__call__() method will be called instead of the decorated function. It does essentially the same thing as the wrapper() function in your earlier examples. Note that you need to use the functools.update_wrapper() function instead of @functools.wraps.

This @CountCalls decorator works the same as the one in the previous section:

Each call to say_whee() is counted and noted. In the next section, you’ll look at more examples of decorators.

You’ve come a long way now, having figured out how to create all kinds of decorators. You’ll wrap it up, putting your newfound knowledge to use by creating a few more examples that might be useful in the real world.

As noted earlier, your previous implementation of @slow_down always sleeps for one second. Now you know how to add parameters to decorators, so you can rewrite @slow_down using an optional rate argument that controls how long it sleeps:

You’re using the boilerplate introduced in the Creating Decorators With Optional Arguments section to make @slow_down callable both with and without arguments. The same recursive countdown() function as earlier now sleeps two seconds between each count:

As before, you must run the example yourself to see the effect of the decorator:

There’ll be a two second pause between each number in the countdown.

A singleton is a class with only one instance. There are several singletons in Python that you use frequently, including None, True, and False. The fact that None is a singleton allows you to compare for None using the is keyword, like you did when creating decorators with optional arguments:

Using is returns True only for objects that are the exact same instance. The following @singleton decorator turns a class into a singleton by storing the first instance of the class as an attribute. Later attempts at creating an instance simply return the stored instance:

As you see, this class decorator follows the same template as your function decorators. The only difference is that you’re using cls instead of func as the parameter name to indicate that it’s meant to be a class decorator.

Check it out in practice:

By comparing object IDs and checking with the is keyword, you confirm that first_one is indeed the exact same instance as another_one.

Note: Singleton classes aren’t really used as often in Python as in other languages. The effect of a singleton is usually better implemented as a global variable inside a module.

Class decorators are less common than function decorators. You should document these well, so that your users know how to apply them.

Decorators can provide a nice mechanism for caching and memoization. As an example, look at a recursive definition of the Fibonacci sequence:

While this implementation is straightforward, its runtime performance is terrible:

To calculate the tenth Fibonacci number, you should only need to calculate the preceding Fibonacci numbers, but this implementation somehow needs a whopping 177 calculations. It gets worse quickly: 21,891 calculations are needed for fibonacci(20) and almost 2.7 million calculations for the thirtieth number. This is because the code keeps recalculating Fibonacci numbers that are already known.

The usual solution is to implement Fibonacci numbers using a for loop and a lookup table. However, caching the calculations will also do the trick. First add a @cache decorator to your module:

The cache works as a lookup table, as it stores calculations in a dictionary. You can add it to fibonacci():

You still use @count_calls to monitor the performance of your calculations. With the cache, fibonacci() only does the necessary calculations once:

Note that in the call to fibonacci(8), no new calculations were needed since the eighth Fibonacci number had already been calculated for fibonacci(10).

In the standard library, a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache is available as @functools.lru_cache. Additionally, you can use a regular cache with @functools.cache.

These decorators have more features than the one you saw above. You should use @functools.lru_cache or @functools.cache instead of writing your own cache decorator.

In the next example, you don’t return the result immediately. Instead, you add a call to print() to see when a result is calculated and not just retrieved from the cache:

The maxsize parameter specifies how many recent calls are cached. The default value is 128, but you can specify maxsize=None to cache all function calls. Using @functools.cache has the same effect as maxsize=None. However, be aware that this can cause memory problems if you’re caching many large objects.

You can use the .cache_info() method to see how the cache performs, and you can tune it if needed. In your example, you used an artificially small maxsize to see the effect of elements being removed from the cache:

In these examples, you calculate a few Fibonacci numbers. Your cache only holds four calculations at a time. For example, after calculating fibonacci(10), it holds the seventh, eight, ninth, and tenth number.

Therefore, you’re able to find fibonacci(8) without doing any recalculations. Then you ask for fibonacci(5), but that fifth number has been deleted from the cache. It therefore needs to be calculated from scratch.

In most applications, you don’t need to constrain your cache and can use @functools.cache directly.

The following example is somewhat similar to the registering plugins example from earlier, in that it doesn’t really change the behavior of the decorated function. Instead, it simply adds unit as a function attribute:

The following example calculates the volume of a cylinder based on its radius and height in centimeters:

You’ve added information to volume() that the result should be interpreted as cubic centimeters. You can later access the .unit function attribute when needed:

Note that you could’ve achieved something similar using function annotations:

However, since annotations are used for type hints, it’s a bit clunky to combine such units as annotations with static type checking.

Units become even more powerful and fun when connected with a library that can convert between units. One such library is pint. With pint installed (python -m pip install Pint), you can convert the volume to cubic inches or gallons, for example:

You use pint to create a quantity that has both a magnitude and a unit. By calling .to(), you convert to other units. For example, the example cylinder is about 141 cubic centimeters, which translates to approximately 8.63 cubic inches and 0.0373 gallons.

You could also modify the decorator to return a pint Quantity directly. Such a Quantity is made by multiplying a value with the unit. In pint, units must be looked up in a UnitRegistry. You can store the registry as a function attribute on the decorator to avoid cluttering the namespace:

With the @use_unit decorator, converting units is practically effortless:

When Usain Bolt ran 100 meters in 9.58 seconds at the 2009 world championships, he had an average speed of 10.4 meters per second. This translates to about 37.6 kilometers per hour and 23.4 miles per hour.

You’ll now look at one last use case. Take a quick look at the following Flask route handler:

Here you ensure that the key student_id is part of the request. Although this validation works, it doesn’t really belong in the function itself. Additionally, there may be other routes that use the same validation. So, to keep it DRY, you can abstract out any unnecessary logic with a decorator. The following @validate_json decorator will do the job:

In the above code, the decorator takes a variable-length list as an argument so that you can pass in as many string arguments as necessary, each representing a key used to validate the JSON data:

• Line 4: The list of keys that must be present in the JSON is given as arguments to the decorator.
• Line 9: The wrapper function validates that each expected key is present in the JSON data.

The route handler can then focus on its real job—updating grades—as it can safely assume that the JSON data are valid:

You apply @validate_json, which simplifies the logic inside update_grade().

This has been quite a journey! You started this tutorial by looking closer at functions, and particularly how you can define them inside other functions and pass them around just like any other Python object. Then you learned about decorators and how to write them such that:

• They can be reused.
• They can decorate functions with arguments and return values.
• They can use @functools.wraps to look more like the decorated function.

In the second part of the tutorial, you saw more advanced decorators and learned how to:

• Decorate classes
• Nest decorators
• Add arguments to decorators
• Keep state within decorators
• Use classes as decorators

You saw that, to define a decorator, you typically define a function returning a wrapper function. The wrapper function uses *args and **kwargs to pass on arguments to the decorated function. If you want your decorator to also take arguments, then you need to nest the wrapper function inside another function. In this case, you usually end up with three return statements.

You can download the code from this tutorial by clicking below:

Get Your Code: Click here to download the free sample code that shows you how to create and use Python decorators.

If you’re still looking for more, the book Python Tricks has a section on decorators, as does the Python Cookbook by David Beazley and Brian K. Jones.

For a deep dive into the historical discussion on how decorators should be implemented in Python, see PEP 318 as well as the Python Decorator Wiki. You can find more examples of decorators in the Python Decorator Library. The decorator module can simplify creating your own decorators, and its documentation contains further decorator examples.

Decorators Cheat Sheet: Click here to get access to a free three-page Python decorators cheat sheet that summarizes the techniques explained in this tutorial.

Now that you have some experience with Python decorators, you can use the questions and answers below to check your understanding and recap what you’ve learned.

These FAQs are related to the most important concepts you’ve covered in this tutorial. Click the Show/Hide toggle beside each question to reveal the answer.

Python decorators are functions that modify the behavior of other functions or classes. You use them to wrap another function, allowing you to add functionality to existing code without modifying it directly.

You can use decorators to log function calls, measure execution time, enforce access control and authentication, or cache results. They’re a powerful way to separate concerns and enhance code reusability.

To write a custom decorator, you define a function that takes a function as an argument, defines a wrapper function inside it, and returns this wrapper. The wrapper function usually calls the original function and can modify its behavior.

You can apply multiple decorators to a function by stacking them above the function definition. The decorators will be applied from the bottom up, meaning the topmost decorator will wrap all the others.

Yes, the order of decorators matters. Decorators are applied from the innermost to the outermost, so the behavior of a function can change depending on how you order them.

Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our interactive “Decorators” quiz. You’ll receive a score upon completion to help you track your learning progress:

Interactive Quiz

In this quiz, you'll revisit the foundational concepts of what Python decorators are and how to create and use them.

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Python Decorators 101

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