Libraries

Standard library and pre-installed packages available to functions, including requests, jsonschema, and urllib3.

Python required. Functions run in a managed sandbox with the standard library plus the packages listed below — no additional installs. Contact your PolyAI representative if you need a library that isn’t listed.

Execution environment

Functions run in a sandboxed cloud environment. This means:

• No local file system access – you cannot read or write files from your machine (e.g., CSV files, text files, or databases stored locally).
• No package installation – only the standard library and the pre-installed packages listed below are available.
• Network access – you can make outbound HTTP requests using the requests library to call external APIs or fetch hosted data.

If you need to use data from a file, host it externally (e.g., on a web server or cloud storage) and fetch it at runtime using requests.

Standard library

Within functions you have access to the full Python standard library, including modules like datetime, json, re, urllib, and hashlib.

Notable language features

The runtime supports modern Python language features, including:

• Structural pattern matching (match/case, Python 3.10+) – a cleaner alternative to long if/elif chains for branching on values or structures. See the Python docs on match statements.
• Parenthesized context managers (Python 3.10+) – you can use parentheses to split multiple context managers across lines:
  with (
      open("input.json") as infile,
      open("output.json", "w") as outfile,
  ):
      ...
  
• Exception Groups and except* (Python 3.11+) – handle multiple exceptions raised concurrently. Useful when your function makes parallel API calls. See PEP 654.

Pre-installed packages

The following packages are pre-installed and available for import:

Library	Description
requests	HTTP library for making API requests
urllib3	Low-level HTTP client
jsonschema	JSON schema validation

The requests library is the recommended way to make external API calls from your functions. See the requests quickstart guide for usage examples.

If you encounter unexpected behavior with a library, contact your PolyAI representative.