Initializing cherrypy.session early

I love CherryPy's API for sessions, except for one detail. Instead of saying cherrypy.session["spam"] I'd like to be able to just say session["spam"].

Unfortunately, I can't simply have a global from cherrypy import session in one of my modules, because the cherrypy.session object isn't created until the first time a page request is made. Is there some way to get CherryPy to initialize its session object immediately instead of on the first page request?

I have two ugly alternatives if the answer is no:

First, I can do something like this

def import_session():
    global session
    while not hasattr(cherrypy, "session"):
        sleep(0.1)
    session = cherrypy.session

Thread(target=import_session).start()

This feels like a big kludge, but I really hate writing cherrypy.session["spam"] every time, so to me it's worth it.

My second solution is to do something like

class SessionKludge:
    def __getitem__(self, name):
        return cherrypy.session[name]
    def __setitem__(self, name, val):
        cherrypy.session[name] = val

session = SessionKludge()

but this feels like an even bigger kludge and I'd need to do more work to implement the other dictionary functions such as .get

So I'd definitely prefer a simple way to initialize the object myself. Does anyone know how to do this?

Solution

For CherryPy 3.1, you would need to find the right subclass of Session, run its 'setup' classmethod, and then set cherrypy.session to a ThreadLocalProxy. That all happens in cherrypy.lib.sessions.init, in the following chunks:

# Find the storage class and call setup (first time only).
storage_class = storage_type.title() + 'Session'
storage_class = globals()[storage_class]
if not hasattr(cherrypy, "session"):
    if hasattr(storage_class, "setup"):
        storage_class.setup(**kwargs)

# Create cherrypy.session which will proxy to cherrypy.serving.session
if not hasattr(cherrypy, "session"):
    cherrypy.session = cherrypy._ThreadLocalProxy('session')

Reducing (replace FileSession with the subclass you want):

FileSession.setup(**kwargs)
cherrypy.session = cherrypy._ThreadLocalProxy('session')

The "kwargs" consist of "timeout", "clean_freq", and any subclass-specific entries from tools.sessions.* config.