What does functools.wraps do?

When you use a decorator, you're replacing one function with another. In other words, if you have a decorator

def logged(func):
    def with_logging(*args, **kwargs):
        print(func.__name__ + " was called")
        return func(*args, **kwargs)
    return with_logging

then when you say

@logged
def f(x):
   """does some math"""
   return x + x * x

it's exactly the same as saying

def f(x):
    """does some math"""
    return x + x * x
f = logged(f)

and your function f is replaced with the function with_logging. Unfortunately, this means that if you then say

print(f.__name__)

it will print with_logging because that's the name of your new function. In fact, if you look at the docstring for f, it will be blank because with_logging has no docstring, and so the docstring you wrote won't be there anymore. Also, if you look at the pydoc result for that function, it won't be listed as taking one argument x; instead it'll be listed as taking *args and **kwargs because that's what with_logging takes.

If using a decorator always meant losing this information about a function, it would be a serious problem. That's why we have functools.wraps. This takes a function used in a decorator and adds the functionality of copying over the function name, docstring, arguments list, etc. And since wraps is itself a decorator, the following code does the correct thing:

from functools import wraps
def logged(func):
    @wraps(func)
    def with_logging(*args, **kwargs):
        print(func.__name__ + " was called")
        return func(*args, **kwargs)
    return with_logging

@logged
def f(x):
   """does some math"""
   return x + x * x

print(f.__name__)  # prints 'f'
print(f.__doc__)   # prints 'does some math'

As of python 3.5+:

@functools.wraps(f)
def g():
    pass

Is an alias for g = functools.update_wrapper(g, f). It does exactly three things:

• it copies the __module__, __name__, __qualname__, __doc__, and __annotations__ attributes of f on g. This default list is in WRAPPER_ASSIGNMENTS, you can see it in the functools source.
• it updates the __dict__ of g with all elements from f.__dict__. (see WRAPPER_UPDATES in the source)
• it sets a new __wrapped__=f attribute on g

The consequence is that g appears as having the same name, docstring, module name, and signature than f. The only problem is that concerning the signature this is not actually true: it is just that inspect.signature follows wrapper chains by default. You can check it by using inspect.signature(g, follow_wrapped=False) as explained in the doc. This has annoying consequences:

• the wrapper code will execute even when the provided arguments are invalid.
• the wrapper code can not easily access an argument using its name, from the received *args, **kwargs. Indeed one would have to handle all cases (positional, keyword, default) and therefore to use something like Signature.bind().

Now there is a bit of confusion between functools.wraps and decorators, because a very frequent use case for developing decorators is to wrap functions. But both are completely independent concepts. If you're interested in understanding the difference, I implemented helper libraries for both: decopatch to write decorators easily, and makefun to provide a signature-preserving replacement for @wraps. Note that makefun relies on the same proven trick than the famous decorator library.

1. Assume we have this: Simple Decorator which takes a function’s output and puts it into a string, followed by three !!!!.

def mydeco(func):
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        return f'{func(*args, **kwargs)}!!!'
    return wrapper

2. Let’s now decorate two different functions with “mydeco”:

@mydeco
def add(a, b):
    '''Add two objects together, the long way'''
    return a + b

@mydeco
def mysum(*args):
    '''Sum any numbers together, the long way'''
    total = 0
    for one_item in args:
        total += one_item
    return total

3. when run add(10,20), mysum(1,2,3,4), it worked!

>>> add(10,20)
'30!!!'

>>> mysum(1,2,3,4)
'10!!!!'

4. However, the name attribute, which gives us the name of a function when we define it,

>>>add.__name__
'wrapper`

>>>mysum.__name__
'wrapper'

5. Worse

>>> help(add)
Help on function wrapper in module __main__:
wrapper(*args, **kwargs)

>>> help(mysum)
Help on function wrapper in module __main__:
wrapper(*args, **kwargs)

6. we can fix partially by:

def mydeco(func):
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        return f'{func(*args, **kwargs)}!!!'
    wrapper.__name__ = func.__name__
    wrapper.__doc__ = func.__doc__
    return wrapper

7. now we run step 5 (2nd time) again:

>>> help(add)
Help on function add in module __main__:

add(*args, **kwargs)
     Add two objects together, the long way

>>> help(mysum)
Help on function mysum in module __main__:

mysum(*args, **kwargs)
    Sum any numbers together, the long way

8. but we can use functools.wraps (decotator tool)

from functools import wraps

def mydeco(func):
    @wraps(func)
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        return f'{func(*args, **kwargs)}!!!'
    return wrapper

9. now run step 5 (3rd time) again

>>> help(add)
Help on function add in module main:
add(a, b)
     Add two objects together, the long way

>>> help(mysum)
Help on function mysum in module main:
mysum(*args)
     Sum any numbers together, the long way

Reference

this is the source code about wraps:

WRAPPER_ASSIGNMENTS = ('__module__', '__name__', '__doc__')

WRAPPER_UPDATES = ('__dict__',)

def update_wrapper(wrapper,
                   wrapped,
                   assigned = WRAPPER_ASSIGNMENTS,
                   updated = WRAPPER_UPDATES):

    """Update a wrapper function to look like the wrapped function

       wrapper is the function to be updated
       wrapped is the original function
       assigned is a tuple naming the attributes assigned directly
       from the wrapped function to the wrapper function (defaults to
       functools.WRAPPER_ASSIGNMENTS)
       updated is a tuple naming the attributes of the wrapper that
       are updated with the corresponding attribute from the wrapped
       function (defaults to functools.WRAPPER_UPDATES)
    """
    for attr in assigned:
        setattr(wrapper, attr, getattr(wrapped, attr))
    for attr in updated:
        getattr(wrapper, attr).update(getattr(wrapped, attr, {}))
    # Return the wrapper so this can be used as a decorator via partial()
    return wrapper

def wraps(wrapped,
          assigned = WRAPPER_ASSIGNMENTS,
          updated = WRAPPER_UPDATES):
    """Decorator factory to apply update_wrapper() to a wrapper function

   Returns a decorator that invokes update_wrapper() with the decorated
   function as the wrapper argument and the arguments to wraps() as the
   remaining arguments. Default arguments are as for update_wrapper().
   This is a convenience function to simplify applying partial() to
   update_wrapper().
    """
    return partial(update_wrapper, wrapped=wrapped,
                   assigned=assigned, updated=updated)