I was writing some Python code for a project and needed a class to hold constants. Unfortunately, Python doesn’t natively support constants or static classes. After trying several different methods of implementing a constants class in this language, I decided to use a meta class. The code looks like this:

class MetaConstants(type): """This is a meta-class for Constants that forces all the properties to be read-only."""

_CONSTANT_ONE = "foo"
_CONSTANT_TWO = "bar"

@property
def CONSTANT_ONE(cls):
    return cls._CONSTANT_ONE

@property
def CONSTANT_TWO(cls):
    return cls._CONSTANT_TWO

class Constants(object): metaclass=MetaConstants

In Python, a metaclass defines how a class behaves. A class is an instance of a metaclass. Setting a “__metaclass__” attribute in a class tells Python to use the metaclass specified to construct the new class.

The way that my class is implemented, I can easily add new read-only constants using private variables and properties in the MetaConstants class and call them statically using the Constants class.

print Constants.CONSTANT_ONE

prints “foo”

These are effectively immutable; the metaclass prevents changes to the properties.

Constants.CONSTANT_TWO = “Hello World”

Result: AttributeError: can’t set attribute

Reference: Stack Overflow: What is a Meta Class in Python?