How do I pass a class field to a decorator on a class method as an argument? What I want to do is something like:

class Client(object):
    def __init__(self, url):
        self.url = url

    @check_authorization("some_attr", self.url)
    def get(self):
        do_work()

It complains that self does not exist for passing self.url to the decorator. Is there a way around this?

Yes. Instead of passing in the instance attribute at class definition time, check it at runtime:

def check_authorization(f):
    def wrapper(*args):
        print args[0].url
        return f(*args)
    return wrapper

class Client(object):
    def __init__(self, url):
        self.url = url

    @check_authorization
    def get(self):
        print 'get'

>>> Client('http://www.google.com').get()
http://www.google.com
get

The decorator intercepts the method arguments; the first argument is the instance, so it reads the attribute off of that. You can pass in the attribute name as a string to the decorator and use getattr if you don’t want to hardcode the attribute name:

def check_authorization(attribute):
    def _check_authorization(f):
        def wrapper(self, *args):
            print getattr(self, attribute)
            return f(self, *args)
        return wrapper
    return _check_authorization

from re import search
from functools import wraps

def is_match(_lambda, pattern):
    def wrapper(f):
        @wraps(f)
        def wrapped(self, *f_args, **f_kwargs):
            if callable(_lambda) and search(pattern, (_lambda(self) or '')): 
                f(self, *f_args, **f_kwargs)
        return wrapped
    return wrapper

class MyTest(object):

    def __init__(self):
        self.name = 'foo'
        self.surname = 'bar'

    @is_match(lambda x: x.name, 'foo')
    @is_match(lambda x: x.surname, 'foo')
    def my_rule(self):
        print 'my_rule : ok'

    @is_match(lambda x: x.name, 'foo')
    @is_match(lambda x: x.surname, 'bar')
    def my_rule2(self):
        print 'my_rule2 : ok'



test = MyTest()
test.my_rule()
test.my_rule2()

ouput: my_rule2 : ok

A more concise example might be as follows:

#/usr/bin/env python3
from functools import wraps

def wrapper(method):
    @wraps(method)
    def _impl(self, *method_args, **method_kwargs):
        method_output = method(self, *method_args, **method_kwargs)
        return method_output + "!"
    return _impl

class Foo:
    @wrapper
    def bar(self, word):
        return word

f = Foo()
result = f.bar("kitty")
print(result)

Which will print:

kitty!

Another option would be to abandon the syntactic sugar and decorate in the __init__ of the class.

def countdown(number):
    def countdown_decorator(func):
        def func_wrapper():
            for index in reversed(range(1, number+1)):
                print("{}".format(index))
            func()
        return func_wrapper
    return countdown_decorator

class MySuperClass():
    def __init__(self, number):
        self.number = number
        self.do_thing = countdown(number)(self.do_thing)

    def do_thing(self):
        print('im doing stuff!')


myclass = MySuperClass(3)

myclass.do_thing()

which would print

3
2
1
im doing stuff!

You can’t. There’s no self in the class body, because no instance exists. You’d need to pass it, say, a str containing the attribute name to lookup on the instance, which the returned function can then do, or use a different method entirely.