Building RESTful APIs with Flask: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

As you continue to explore the world of web development, your newfound skills in building RESTful APIs will open doors to exciting possibilities and opportunities in the field. We first initialize a Flask app instance in the code above, configure it with an SQLite database, and finally create the database. With our working directory created and opened in our IDE, we’ll start off by creating a file named app.py. So to elaborate, if you have done web scraping, then a 200 response code means your request to a particular URL is successfully made, which returns a response. The structure for post looks similar to the existing get schema.

In this section, you’ll check in with the Flask REST API project that you’re working on. You want to make sure that it’s ready for the next steps in this tutorial series. The major crux of this tutorial is dealt with in the file above. Flask provides a utility called pluggable views, which allows you to create views in the form of classes instead of normally as functions. Method-based dispatching (MethodView) is an implementation of pluggable views which allows you to write methods corresponding to the HTTP methods in lower case. In the example above, I have written the get() and post() methods corresponding to HTTP’s GET and POST respectively.

Learn

This elegant framework built for high-performance and fast-to-code APIs is not one to miss. “Flask allows Python developers to create lightweight RESTful APIs.” This part of the documentation will show you how to get started in using
Flask-RESTful with Flask.

All of this can happen when you create a configuration file that your Flask application can access. Now that you’ve got a working web server, you can add your first REST API endpoint. To do restful api python flask this, you’ll use Connexion, which you installed in the previous section. The parenthesized (venv) in front of the prompt indicate that you’ve successfully activated the virtual environment.

FastAPI vs Flask – Choosing the Right Python Web Framework for Your API

That’s okay for now, because the purpose of home.html is to verify that your Flask project responds as intended. That’s why you’ll send them notes, to increase the chance of getting valuable gifts from them. The Dockerfile is simple but effective, and using it is similarly easy. With these commands and this Dockerfile, we can run as many instances of our API as we need with no trouble. It’s just a matter of defining another port on the host or even another host. Pipenv is a dependency manager that isolates projects in private environments, allowing packages to be installed per project.

• You can use Flask extensions like Flask-JWT or Flask-OAuthlib to implement authentication and authorization in your API.
• Because person and note data exist in separate tables, the creation or update timestamp can be named consistently in both tables, as there’s no conflict for names across tables.
• As we will use this file to check if Flask was correctly installed, we don’t need to nest it in a new directory.
• Lastly, Flask has extensive documentation that addresses everything developers need to start.
• This object must contain lname, which must not exist in the database already.
• Then, it’ll find the SQL statement delimiter character ; and will go right ahead and drop the entire table.

This will make sure that any changes you’re making to people data are performed on the database rather than the obsolete PEOPLE dictionary. SQLAlchemy is a big project and provides a lot of functionality to work with databases using Python. One of the features that it provides is an object-relational mapper (ORM). This ORM enables you to interact with the person database table in a more Pythonic way by mapping a row of fields from the database table to a Python object. In the world of web development, creating robust RESTful APIs is an essential skill.

REST API Development with Flask and Python

This code returns a JSON response containing the list of items. In this code, we import the Flask class, create an instance of it, and run the app if the script is executed directly. There are extensions that simplify life and automate the implementation of RESTful APIs to a huge extent.

By breaking the dataset into two tables and introducing the concept of a foreign key, you’ll make the data a little more complex to think about. But you’ll resolve the disadvantages of a single table representation. Notice that, like the person table, the note table has a unique identifier called id, which is the primary key for the note table. The person_id column creates the relationship to the person table.

Your API response only listed the primary keys of each person’s notes. That’s fair, because you haven’t yet declared how Marshmallow should deserialize the notes. In the previous section, you created the relationship between a person and their notes by adding a .notes attribute to the Person class. Now that you’ve updated People and created the model for Note, go on to update the database. Because person and note data exist in separate tables, the creation or update timestamp can be named consistently in both tables, as there’s no conflict for names across tables.