Switch to FastAPI

[banesullivan]

Flask has been giving me too many headaches lately, and I've been wanting to learn/use FastAPI.

I'm going to rewrite the internals of localtileserver to strip out flask and use fastapi. The average user will see not change in the Python API, but any projects using the flask blueprint (I think I'm the only person doing that) will no longer be supported.

When this lands, it will completely change the dependencies (hopefully making them lighter).

[banesullivan]

It seems there's at least one stakeholder project using the flask app: https://github.com/supervisionearth/svs-tileserver

But they seem to be using a fork so I may go ahead and do this change when I have free time

[meteoDaniel]

Dear @banesullivan where is the difference between localtileserver and https://developmentseed.org/titiler/ ? They are using FastAPI as backend.

[vincentsarago]

@meteoDaniel Titiler uses rio-tiler/rasterio for data access while localtileserver uses the large-image module.

[banesullivan]

Exactly correct, @vincentsarago! Thanks for chiming in!

localtileserver is honestly a hobby/toy project of mine, and I never thought it would get as many users as it has. I'm hoping to refactor this entirely to only support Jupyter and CLI usage which would drop support for using localtileserver as microservivce in favor of titiler.

Then I also want to experiment with using rio-tiler as the backend for this... but maybe it makes more sense for me to just contribute to rio-viz