Python REST APIs With Flask, Connexion, and SQLAlchemy Part 1

REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer and is an architectural style used in modern web development. It defines a set or rules/constraints for a web application to send and receive data.

• It will also take additional query parameters, allowing users to filter by fields other than ID.
• This line ask the application to import Flask module from flask package.
• Before building more functionality into our application, let’s reflect on some of the API design decisions that we’ve made so far.
• We’d have to retrain it with all of your old data, plus your new data.
• In HTML responses, the code 200 means “OK”, while the code 404 means “Not Found” .

In this section, you’ll prepare the development environment for your Flask REST API project. First, you’ll create a virtual environment and install all the dependencies that you need for your project. The REST API that you’ll be building will serve a simple people data structure where the people are keyed to the last name, and any updates are marked with a new timestamp. By leveraging Swagger UI, you’ll create handy documentation for your API along the way. That way, you’ll have the opportunity to test how your API works at each stage of this tutorial and get a useful overview of all your endpoints. Although your Flask functions in people.py work with people_id, it seems that the API hasn’t heard the news yet.

Creating a RESTful Endpoint with Flask

This variable will be “__main__”, if this file is being directly run through Python as a script. If we import the file instead, the value of __name__ will be the name of the file where we did the import. For instance, if we had test.py and run.py, and we imported test.py into run.py the __name__ value of test.py will be test.

Activate the environment created and install the flask using pip. We will create an environment named ‘newenv’ using conda as shown below with specified version of python if needed.By default it installs latest python version. Thereby, it can avoid compatibility issues between the different versions of the libraries . Using dictionaries in a simple use case like the one above is enough. Project directory created before will hold metadata about our project, like what dependencies it has, while this new one will be our module with our Python scripts.

Create a New Person

Figure out other use cases and expand based on what you learned with the initial API use case. For Django I recommend Django REST framework and for Flask I recommend Flask-RESTful. Gives an answer from a Dropbox API developer as to their decision making process. Hacker News had a discussion onwhat’s the best way to write an API spec?

• Relational databases allow for the storage and retrieval of data, which is stored in tables.
• Postman is an API client that makes it easy for developers like you to create, share, test and document APIs.
• In contrast, the application that receives and processes the request is referred to as the server.
• If you’re curious about building the back end yourself first, then it’s a good idea to start with the first part of the series and work your way through.

This is the most flexible python api designroach while writing REST APIs but involves writing much more code. Let’s make a GET call first to ensure that we don’t have any products created yet. As per the RESTful API design, a get call which looks something like /product/should list all products. Then I will create a couple of products by making POST calls to /product/ with some data.

Run the app

Txt need all dependencies and sub-dependencies listed explicitly, a manual process that is tedious and error-prone. FastAPI is growing at high speed, with 48k stars on Github, 370 contributors, and more than 3.9k forks. This elegant framework built for high-performance and fast-to-code APIs is not one to miss. History Data Service – A collection of data from a wide variety of historical sources.

• It is considered micro-framework, because it doesn’t depend on anything else.
• Django REST framework andTastypie are the two most widely used API frameworks to use with Django.
• For the endpoint used to retrieve incomes, we defined an instance of IncomeSchema to produce a JSON representation of incomes.
• In part two of this series, you’ll learn how to use a proper database to store your data permanently instead of relying on in-memory storage as you did here.
• You’ll create the corresponding Python code later in this tutorial.
• Each Person object has an ID, a first name, a last name, a timestamp, and a relationship to the notes that are connected to them.