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

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We are building an API and defining the User data dictionary, which contains a username and password. When you work in real-time use cases, you accept the username and password through a configuration file or from a database. First, we create a primary function to match the username and password and a GET method that says that anyone who hits on this API, so without login, we cannot access the data. Welcome to the complete guide on creating a REST API using Flask. In one of our previous articles, we learned the basics of web development using Flask and how to set it up.

Popular choices are Microsoft Visual Studio Code or JetBrains PyCharm. 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. Also, just like each new Python version includes new features, there may be keywords added or deprecated in the OpenAPI specification.

Explore Your API Documentation

If a person is found, then person contains a Person object and you return the serialized object. Rather than using .all(), you use the .one_or_none() method to get one person, or return None if no match is found. The read_one() function receives an lname parameter from the REST URL path, indicating that the user is looking for a specific person.

Flask, on the other hand, offers a smooth developer experience through its simplicity and lightweight nature. FastAPI shines with its intuitive API documentation, automatic data validation, and robust editor support. Its opinionated approach and adherence to best practices help developers avoid common pitfalls and streamline the development process. Flask, while not quite matching the sheer speed of FastAPI, still delivers solid performance and can handle most workloads with ease. As such, the choice of an API framework can have a profound impact on the performance, scalability, and maintainability of your software applications. But while the above method will work just fine it seems overkill to me.

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

Once we have a valid Player Model we add it to the database using Flask-SQLAlchemy, and finish up by returning the new Player’s Id, and a successful 201 HTTP status code. If the Player is already in the database we catch an IntegrityError, log it, and return a 500 HTTP status code to the user. Currently you’re able to receive all the notes of a person when you request data from that particular person.

In the next part of this series, you’ll extend your REST API so that you can create, read, update, and delete notes. Every note will be connected to a person, so you’ll add relationships between notes and people to your database. In this part of the series, you’ll add a restful api python flask new table to store notes. To connect notes to a person, you’ll create relationships between the entries of the person table and the note table in your database. If the last name is unique, then you deserialize the person object as new_person and add it to db.session.

How to test Fast Api and Flask with Apidog

Any files or data that get placed into this directory will only persist for the life of the test using this fixture. This is very handy, and makes for a great spot to place a test database, as our tests will be messing around with our data. If you completed one of my previous projects from my other Python posts you should already have Python 3 and pipenv installed. However, if this is your first Python project with me then you will need to install Python 3 as well as pipenv. Expects ssl.SSLContext , a tuple in the form (cert_file, pkey_file) , or the string ‘adhoc’ if the server should automatically create the context.

  • Pytest automatically finds this fixture for us, and there is no need to import it.
  • Testing Fast API and Flask applications is easy and enjoyable with Apidog.
  • I managed to achieve this, sometimes API’s get ugly, in my case, I need to recursively call the function as the application has a extremely recursive nature (a tree).
  • Resources typically represent the nouns in our API, such as Players, Teams, Seasons, and Stats.
  • Its flexibility and ease of use have made it a popular choice for projects of varying complexity.

The method name should be the same as its corresponding HTTP method and written in lowercase. However, these methods do not have a route decorator, so they are based on resource routes. Whatever class we define, we define the route to it using add resource method and on which route we have to call it. Your server will run read_all() when it receives an HTTP request to GET /api/people. The return value of read_all() is a list of dictionaries with information about a person.

Inspect Your Current Data Structure

In contrast, you only need to know the ID of the note that you want to get rid of when calling delete(). Working with SQLAlchemy’s modeled data inside your programs is very convenient. However, the REST API works with JSON data, and here you can run into an issue with the SQLAlchemy model. Working with a timestamp based on UTC is a good standard to follow. Here’s a tool kit site to work with in order to better understand such timestamps. With your Swagger UI documentation, you’ll be able to interact with your REST API and make sure that everything works as intended.

restful api python flask

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