Starlette is a low level web framework for modern (as of 2025) async python development most famously used by FastAPI.
From the Starlette documentation ¶ #
Starlette is a lightweight ASGI framework/toolkit, which is ideal for building async web services in Python.
It is production-ready, and gives you the following:
- A lightweight, low-complexity HTTP web framework.
- WebSocket support.
- In-process background tasks.
- Startup and shutdown events.
- Test client built on httpx.
- CORS, GZip, Static Files, Streaming responses.
- Session and Cookie support.
- 100% test coverage.
- 100% type annotated codebase.
- Few hard dependencies.
- Compatible with asyncio and trio backends.
- Great overall performance against independent benchmarks.