---
title: "Starlette"
description: "Starlette is a low level web framework for modern (as of 2025) async python development most famously used by FastAPI."
date: 2025-10-22
published: true
tags:
  - glossary
template: glossary
---


Starlette is a low level web framework for modern (as of 2025) async python development most
famously used by FastAPI.

## From the [Starlette documentation](https://www.starlette.dev/)

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.