Is there a simple, elegant way to define singletons?

I don't really see the need, as a module with functions (and not a class) would serve well as a singleton. All its variables would be bound to the module, which could not be instantiated repeatedly anyway.

If you do wish to use a class, there is no way of creating private classes or private constructors in Python, so you can't protect against multiple instantiations, other than just via convention in use of your API. I would still just put methods in a module, and consider the module as the singleton.

Here's my own implementation of singletons. All you have to do is decorate the class; to get the singleton, you then have to use the Instance method. Here's an example:

@Singleton
class Foo:
   def __init__(self):
       print 'Foo created'

f = Foo() # Error, this isn't how you get the instance of a singleton

f = Foo.instance() # Good. Being explicit is in line with the Python Zen
g = Foo.instance() # Returns already created instance

print f is g # True

And here's the code:

class Singleton:
    """
    A non-thread-safe helper class to ease implementing singletons.
    This should be used as a decorator -- not a metaclass -- to the
    class that should be a singleton.

    The decorated class can define one `__init__` function that
    takes only the `self` argument. Also, the decorated class cannot be
    inherited from. Other than that, there are no restrictions that apply
    to the decorated class.

    To get the singleton instance, use the `instance` method. Trying
    to use `__call__` will result in a `TypeError` being raised.

    """

    def __init__(self, decorated):
        self._decorated = decorated

    def instance(self):
        """
        Returns the singleton instance. Upon its first call, it creates a
        new instance of the decorated class and calls its `__init__` method.
        On all subsequent calls, the already created instance is returned.

        """
        try:
            return self._instance
        except AttributeError:
            self._instance = self._decorated()
            return self._instance

    def __call__(self):
        raise TypeError('Singletons must be accessed through `instance()`.')

    def __instancecheck__(self, inst):
        return isinstance(inst, self._decorated)

A slightly different approach to implement the singleton in Python is the borg pattern by Alex Martelli (Google employee and Python genius).

class Borg:
    __shared_state = {}
    def __init__(self):
        self.__dict__ = self.__shared_state

So instead of forcing all instances to have the same identity, they share state.

The Python documentation does cover this:

class Singleton(object):
    def __new__(cls, *args, **kwds):
        it = cls.__dict__.get("__it__")
        if it is not None:
            return it
        cls.__it__ = it = object.__new__(cls)
        it.init(*args, **kwds)
        return it
    def init(self, *args, **kwds):
        pass

I would probably rewrite it to look more like this:

class Singleton(object):
    """Use to create a singleton"""
    def __new__(cls, *args, **kwds):
        """
        >>> s = Singleton()
        >>> p = Singleton()
        >>> id(s) == id(p)
        True
        """
        it_id = "__it__"
        # getattr will dip into base classes, so __dict__ must be used
        it = cls.__dict__.get(it_id, None)
        if it is not None:
            return it
        it = object.__new__(cls)
        setattr(cls, it_id, it)
        it.init(*args, **kwds)
        return it

    def init(self, *args, **kwds):
        pass


class A(Singleton):
    pass


class B(Singleton):
    pass


class C(A):
    pass


assert A() is A()
assert B() is B()
assert C() is C()
assert A() is not B()
assert C() is not B()
assert C() is not A()

It should be relatively clean to extend this:

class Bus(Singleton):
    def init(self, label=None, *args, **kwds):
        self.label = label
        self.channels = [Channel("system"), Channel("app")]
        ...

The one time I wrote a singleton in Python I used a class where all the member functions had the classmethod decorator.

class Foo:
    x = 1
  
    @classmethod
    def increment(cls, y=1):
        cls.x += y