How to Build a REST API with Python

As you probably figured out, it makes an HTTP request to an httpbin.org URL with a username and password. I am a final year undergraduate who loves to learn and write about technology. I am learning and working in data science field from past 2 years, and aspire to grow as Big data architect. Enter the username and password you have used, and then hit GET request to get the desired result.

Like we did with other error codes, here we customize the response so that is contains JSON instead of HTML. Relational databases allow for the storage and retrieval of data, which is stored in tables. Save this code as api.py in the api folder you created for this tutorial. You can also create the projects and api folders using your operating system’s graphical user interface.

Developing RESTful APIs with Python and Flask

The next step is to add an endpoint to retrieve a specific programming language resource from the datastore. The details endpoint has an interpolated variable in the endpoint string called programming_language_id. This variable allows you to query for a specific item in your datastore.

The problem with the current design of the API is that clients are forced to construct URIs from the task identifiers that are returned. This is pretty easy in itself, but it indirectly forces clients to know how these URIs need to be built, and this will prevent us from making changes to URIs in the future. We then create a new task dictionary, using the id of the last task plus one (a cheap way to guarantee unique ids in our simple database).

Python Guidelines: API Design

The most well-known is Django, a framework that has a set project structure and which includes many built-in tools. This can save time and effort for experienced programmers, but can be overwhelming. Flask applications tend to be written on a blank canvas, so to speak, and so are more suited to a contained application such as our prototype API. As we’ve learned, documentation is a user’s starting place when working with a new API, and well-designed URLs make it easier for users to intuitively find resources.

Flask applications are known for being lightweight, mainly compared to their Django counterparts. Flask developers call it a microframework, where micro (as explained here) means that the goal is to keep the core simple but extensible. Flask won’t make many decisions for us, such as what database to use or what template engine to choose.

Mapping Income and Expense as Python Classes

The namespace does NOT change when the branding of the product changes. ✅ DO implement your library as a sub-package of the azure root namespace. ✔️ YOU MAY add additional credential types if required by the service. Contact the Architecture board for guidance if you believe you have need to do so. ✅ DO make it possible to directly create clients for each level in the hierarchy. In Azure SDK for Python cilent libraries, this is exposed to users through the ItemPaged protocol.

The change on this endpoint was the addition of IncomeSchema to load an instance of Income based on the JSON data sent by the user. As the transactions list deals with instances of Transaction and its subclasses, we just added the new Income in that list. So definitely check out the dataclasses module if you have classes which are mostly data. There’s an excellent post on the Python sub-Reddit, rather dramatically titled “Why Type Hinting Sucks!

It’s kind of a complicated signature, but this sort of thing is fairly common in Python, and it makes the easy thing easy, but the hard thing doable. All of these changes are backwards-compatible, which is great for existing users. If you’re publishing changes to your library on the Python Package Index (PyPI), you should always bump up the version number and write release notes about what changed. I guess they made the decision early on that if an HTTP request completes, even if it’s an HTTP-level error, the Requests library should treat that as successful. This page doesn’t exist, so it’s a 404 error – my resume lives at /cv/, not /resume/. But Requests doesn’t raise an exception, unless you explicitly call response.raise_for_status().

• That is, in the future, we will also install Docker and run our program on environments like production and staging.
• As StackOverflow recently analyzed, Python is one of the fastest-growing programming languages, having surpassed even Java in the number of questions asked on the platform.
• However, as it is a newer framework, many more resources and libraries are compatible with frameworks like Django and Flask but not with FastAPI.
• Therefore, no matter if the user sends a positive or a negative value, we will always store it as negative to facilitate calculations.
• To find the content developer you should work with, check with your team’s Program Manager.
• As new Hugo winners were added to the database, the script that generated this visualization would immediately be able to use the new information.

As we already touched on, our API will have two endpoints, users and locations. An API (Application Programming Interface) is a simple interface that defines the types of requests (demands/questions, etc.) that can be made, how they are made, and how they are processed. In this section we collect tutorials related to API design or interacting with APIs using Python. REST APIs in web applications would be one example where Python shines. On balance, I definitely think it’s the right thing to do in 2023 to ship your library with type annotations.

Top 8 Python web frameworks

Your API should have documentation describing the resources or functionality available through your API that also provides concrete working examples of request URLs or code for your API. You should have a section for each resource that describes which fields, such as id or title, it accepts. Each section should have an example in the form of a sample HTTP request or block of code. If you have data you wish to share with the world, an API is one way you can get it into the hands of others. However, APIs are not always the best way of sharing data with users.

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. Besides the Transaction class, we also defined a TransactionSchema.