# Middleware

You can add middleware to **FastAPI** applications.

A "middleware" is a function that works with every **request** before it is processed by any specific *path operation*. And also with every **response** before returning it.

* It takes each **request** that comes to your application.
* It can then do something to that **request** or run any needed code.

You actually don't have users that log in to your application but robots, bots, or other systems, that have just an access token? Again, it all works the same.

Just use any kind of model, any kind of class, any kind of database that you need for your application. **FastAPI** has you covered with the dependency injection system.

## Code size

    * Will have the best performance, as it doesn't have much extra code apart from the server itself.
    * You wouldn't write an application in Uvicorn directly. That would mean that your code would have to include more or less, at least, all the code provided by Starlette (or **FastAPI**). And if you did that, your final application would have the same overhead as having used a framework and minimizing your app code and bugs.

    In this case, it's a list of `Item` dataclasses.

6. Here we are returning a dictionary that contains `items` which is a list of dataclasses.

    FastAPI is still capable of <abbr title="converting the data to a format that can be transmitted">serializing</abbr> the data to JSON.

7. Here the `response_model` is using a type annotation of a list of `Author` dataclasses.

```
.
├── app
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── main.py
│   └── test_main.py
```

Let's say that now the file `main.py` with your **FastAPI** app has some other **path operations**.

It has a `GET` operation that could return an error.

It has a `POST` operation that could return several errors.

Both *path operations* require an `X-Token` header.

=== "Python 3.10+"

    ```Python

There's a small detail about names to keep in mind. 💡

The word "**server**" is commonly used to refer to both the remote/cloud computer (the physical or virtual machine) and also the program that is running on that machine (e.g. Uvicorn).

Just keep in mind that when you read "server" in general, it could refer to one of those two things.

            OpenAPI-specific examples.

            It will be added to the generated OpenAPI (e.g. visible at `/docs`).

            Swagger UI (that provides the `/docs` interface) has better support for the
            OpenAPI-specific examples than the JSON Schema `examples`, that's the main
            use case for this.

            Read more about it in the

You can import it directly from `fastapi`:

```python
from fastapi import Request
```

!!! tip
    When you want to define dependencies that should be compatible with both HTTP and WebSockets, you can define a parameter that takes an `HTTPConnection` instead of a `Request` or a `WebSocket`.

        return HTTPAuthorizationCredentials(scheme=scheme, credentials=credentials)


class HTTPBasic(HTTPBase):
    """
    HTTP Basic authentication.

    ## Usage

    Create an instance object and use that object as the dependency in `Depends()`.

    The dependency result will be an `HTTPBasicCredentials` object containing the
    `username` and the `password`.

    Read more about it in the

                    "operationId": "read_items_items__get",
                    "parameters": [
                        {
                            "description": "Query string for the items to search in the database that have a good match",
                            "required": False,
                            "deprecated": True,
                            "schema": IsDict(
                                {