## Previous Steps Before Starting

There are many cases where you want to perform some steps **before starting** your application.

For example, you might want to run **database migrations**.

But in most cases, you will want to perform these steps only **once**.

So, you will want to have a **single process** to perform those **previous steps**, before starting the application.

But at some point, there was no other option than creating something that provided all these features, taking the best ideas from previous tools, and combining them in the best way possible, using language features that weren't even available before (Python 3.6+ type hints).

## Previous tools

### <a href="https://www.djangoproject.com/" class="external-link" target="_blank">Django</a>

...but continue reading below to see how to overcome that.

## Return Type and Data Filtering

Let's continue from the previous example. We wanted to **annotate the function with one type** but return something that includes **more data**.

We want FastAPI to keep **filtering** the data using the response model.

This is the basic idea. But you will probably want to take care of some additional things, like:

* Security - HTTPS
* Running on startup
* Restarts
* Replication (the number of processes running)
* Memory
* Previous steps before starting

This code is something you can actually use in your application, save the password hashes in your database, etc.

We are going to start from where we left in the previous chapter and increment it.

## About JWT

JWT means "JSON Web Tokens".

It's a standard to codify a JSON object in a long dense string without spaces. It looks like this:

```

## Official Docker Image with Gunicorn - Uvicorn

There is an official Docker image that includes Gunicorn running with Uvicorn workers, as detailed in a previous chapter: [Server Workers - Gunicorn with Uvicorn](server-workers.md){.internal-link target=_blank}.

# Classes as Dependencies

Before diving deeper into the **Dependency Injection** system, let's upgrade the previous example.

## A `dict` from the previous example

In the previous example, we were returning a `dict` from our dependency ("dependable"):

=== "Python 3.10+"

    ```Python hl_lines="9"
    {!> ../../../docs_src/dependencies/tutorial001_an_py310.py!}
    ```

=== "Python 3.9+"

    ```Python hl_lines="11"

But before that, handling asynchronous code was quite more complex and difficult.

In previous versions of Python, you could have used threads or <a href="https://www.gevent.org/" class="external-link" target="_blank">Gevent</a>. But the code is way more complex to understand, debug, and think about.

# Server Workers - Gunicorn with Uvicorn

Let's check back those deployment concepts from before:

* Security - HTTPS
* Running on startup
* Restarts
* **Replication (the number of processes running)**
* Memory
* Previous steps before starting

Up to this point, with all the tutorials in the docs, you have probably been running a **server program** like Uvicorn, running a **single process**.

But, sadly, you get nothing useful:

<img src="/img/python-types/image01.png">

### Add types

Let's modify a single line from the previous version.

We will change exactly this fragment, the parameters of the function, from:

```Python
    first_name, last_name
```

to:

```Python
    first_name: str, last_name: str
```