Mokkari

A python wrapper for the Metron Comic Book Database API.

Installation

Bash

pip install mokkari

Example Usage

Python

import mokkari

# Your own config file to keep your credentials secret
from config import username, password

m = mokkari.api(username, password)

# Get all Marvel comics for the week of 2021-06-07
this_week = m.issues_list({"store_date_range_after": "2021-06-07", "store_date_range_before": "2021-06-13", "publisher_name": "marvel"})

# Print the results
for i in this_week:
    print(f"{i.id} {i.issue_name}")

# Retrieve the detail for an individual issue
    asm_68 = m.issue(31660)

# Print the issue Description
print(asm_68.desc)

Rate Limiting

The API has a fixed limit of 20 requests per minute, plus a daily limit that starts at 5,000 requests and is raised for OpenCollective donors (up to 25,000/day). Because the daily limit varies per user, mokkari doesn't hardcode it — it reads the X-RateLimit-* headers Metron returns with every response and pre-empts a request once those headers show a window is exhausted, avoiding an HTTP call that would fail anyway. When a rate limit is exceeded, a RateLimitError is raised.

The most recently observed state is available via session.rate_limit_status:

Python

status = m.rate_limit_status
print(f"Sustained remaining: {status.sustained.remaining}/{status.sustained.limit}")

Handling Rate Limits

The RateLimitError includes a retry_after attribute that tells you exactly how many seconds to wait before making another request:

Python

import mokkari
from mokkari.exceptions import RateLimitError
import time

m = mokkari.api(username, password)

try:
    issue = m.issue(31660)
except RateLimitError as e:
    # Display user-friendly message
    print(f"Rate limited: {e}")

    # Programmatically wait for the exact time needed
    print(f"Waiting {e.retry_after} seconds...")
    time.sleep(e.retry_after)

    # Retry the request
    issue = m.issue(31660)

Thread Safety

A Session can be shared across threads, but the rate-limit check above is advisory rather than a hard gate: it only blocks once the last known response headers show a window is exhausted, and that check isn't synchronized with sending the request. Concurrent threads can therefore each pass the check and send their requests before either response updates rate_limit_status, letting a burst of threads momentarily exceed the per-minute limit (Metron's server-side limit still applies and will reject the excess requests).

If you're calling a shared Session from multiple threads, cap your own concurrency instead of relying on Session to do it for you, e.g. keep a ThreadPoolExecutor at or below the burst limit:

Python

from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor

m = mokkari.api(username, password)

# Keep worker count at or below the burst limit (20/min) to avoid racing
# past the local rate-limit check.
with ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=20) as executor:
    issues = list(executor.map(m.issue, issue_ids))

Documentation

Read the project documentation

Bugs/Requests

Please use the GitHub issue tracker to submit bugs or request features.