### What is "Mounting"

"Mounting" means adding a complete "independent" application in a specific path, that then takes care of handling all the sub-paths.

This is different from using an `APIRouter` as a mounted application is completely independent. The OpenAPI and docs from your main application won't include anything from the mounted application, etc.

# How To - Recipes

Here you will see different recipes or "how to" guides for **several topics**.

Most of these ideas would be more or less **independent**, and in most cases you should only need to study them if they apply directly to **your project**.

If something seems interesting and useful to your project, go ahead and check it, but otherwise, you might probably just skip them.

!!! tip

# Sub Applications - Mounts

If you need to have two independent FastAPI applications, with their own independent OpenAPI and their own docs UIs, you can have a main app and "mount" one (or more) sub-application(s).

## Mounting a **FastAPI** application

"Mounting" means adding a completely "independent" application in a specific path, that then takes care of handling everything under that path, with the _path operations_ declared in that sub-application.

# Benchmarks

Independent TechEmpower benchmarks show **FastAPI** applications running under Uvicorn as <a href="https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=test&runid=7464e520-0dc2-473d-bd34-dbdfd7e85911&hw=ph&test=query&l=zijzen-7" class="external-link" target="_blank">one of the fastest Python frameworks available</a>, only below Starlette and Uvicorn themselves (used internally by FastAPI).

!!! tip
    You could adopt ideas from the section about SQLAlchemy ORM ([SQL (Relational) Databases](../tutorial/sql-databases.md){.internal-link target=_blank}), like using utility functions to perform operations in the database, independent of your **FastAPI** code.

    This section doesn't apply those ideas, to be equivalent to the counterpart in <a href="https://www.starlette.io/database/" class="external-link" target="_blank">Starlette</a>.

* Get the document with that ID.
* Put the contents of the document in a `UserInDB` model.

By creating a function that is only dedicated to getting your user from a `username` (or any other parameter) independent of your *path operation function*, you can more easily re-use it in multiple parts and also add <abbr title="Automated test, written in code, that checks if another piece of code is working correctly.">unit tests</abbr> for it:

$ python ./scripts/docs.py build-all

Building docs for: en
Building docs for: es
Successfully built docs for: es
```

</div>

This builds all those independent MkDocs sites for each language, combines them, and generates the final output at `./site/`.

Then you can serve that with the command `serve`:

<div class="termy">

```console

authors = [
    { name = "Sebastián Ramírez", email = "******@****.***" },
]
classifiers = [
    "Intended Audience :: Information Technology",
    "Intended Audience :: System Administrators",
    "Operating System :: OS Independent",
    "Programming Language :: Python :: 3",
    "Programming Language :: Python",
    "Topic :: Internet",
    "Topic :: Software Development :: Libraries :: Application Frameworks",

Now let's go back a bit and understand what is all that.

The `password` "flow" is one of the ways ("flows") defined in OAuth2, to handle security and authentication.

OAuth2 was designed so that the backend or API could be independent of the server that authenticates the user.

But in this case, the same **FastAPI** application will handle the API and the authentication.

So, let's review it from that simplified point of view:

```

Here we have an empty `yield` because we are actually not using the database object directly.

It is connecting to the database and storing the connection data in an internal variable that is independent for each request (using the `contextvars` tricks from above).

Because the database connection is potentially I/O blocking, this dependency is created with a normal `def` function.