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 python api design with no trouble. It’s just a matter of defining another port on the host or even another host. Flask provides great documentation on what exactly this does.

  • Inspiring aspiring developers to take on the software engineering career path has always been Jack’s goal.
  • As with our Flask example, we’ll simply return success, along with a 201 status code.
  • Code samples shouldn’t be any more complex than they needed to demonstrate the feature.
  • It creates URL endpoints and also, List, Unique and Auto-documented endpoints.
  • We will refactor our application to learn the process of mapping entities as classes.

An API is only as good as its documentationis a strongly held mantra in the web API world because so many APIs have poor documentation that prevents ease-of-use. If an API is not well documented then developers who have options to use something else will just skip it. Runscope is an API testing SaaS application that can test both your own APIs and external APIs that your application relies upon. Django REST framework andTastypie are the two most widely used API frameworks to use with Django. The edge currently goes to Django REST framework based on rough community sentiment. Django REST framework continues to knock out great releases after the 3.0 release mark when Tom Christie ran asuccessful Kickstarter campaign. Creating and exposing APIs allows your web application to interact with other applications through machine-to-machine communication.

Python and REST APIs: Interacting With Web Services

It is not okay to use this technique on a production web server, for that a proper database setup must be used. Here I have decided to include the name of the application and the version of the API in the URL. Including the application name in the URL is useful to provide a namespace that separates this service from others that can be running on the same system. (delete order #123)The REST design does not require a specific format for the data provided with the requests. In general data is provided in the request body as a JSON blob, or sometimes as arguments in the query string portion of the URL. In this article, we learned about the basic components needed to develop a well-structured Flask application.

api design in python

Since more services require control plane APIs than data plane APIs, other namespaces may be used explicitly for control plane only. ✅ DO create a client type corresponding to each level in the hierarchy except for leaf resource types. You may omit creating a client type for leaf node resources. ✅ DO raise an exception if the method call failed to accomplish the user specified task. This includes both situations where the service actively responded with a failure as well as when no response was received. Service-agnostic concepts such as logging, HTTP communication, and error handling should be consistent.

Create the Update Endpoint

You might notice that all of the status codes that begin with a ‘4’ indicate some sort of error. The first number of status codes indicate their categorization. This is useful — you can know that if your status code starts with a ‘2’ it was successful and if it starts with a ‘4’ or ‘5’ there was an error. If you’re interested you can read more about status codes here. To make a ‘GET’ request, we’ll use the requests.get() function, which requires one argument — the URL we want to make the request to. We’ll start by making a request to an API endpoint that doesn’t exist, so we can see what that response code looks like.

Which API is most used?

  • Skyscanner Flight Search – Learn More.
  • Open Weather Map – Learn More.
  • API-FOOTBALL – Learn More.
  • The Cocktail DB – Learn More.
  • REST Countries v1 – Learn More.
  • Yahoo Finance – Learn More.
  • Love Calculator – Learn More.
  • URL Shortener Service – Learn More.

In macOS, click the spotlight icon on the top right corner of your desktop and type terminal. The terminal should be the first application that appears. On Windows, click the Start menu icon and type cmd in the search box, then press Enter. To download Python, follow this link, select the button that says Download Python 3.x.x, and then run the installer as you normally would to install applications on your operating system. In this section we collect tutorials related to API design or interacting with APIs using Python.

Take a Listen to API Intersection

With REST we always try to adhere to the HTTP protocol as much as we can. Now that we need to implement authentication we should do so in the context of HTTP, which provides two forms of authentication called Basic and Digest. We apply this technique to all the other functions and with this we ensure that the client always sees URIs instead of ids. If you read my Flask Mega-Tutorial series you know that Flask is a simple, yet very powerful Python web framework. In this article I’m going to show you how easy it is to create a RESTful web service using Python and the Flask microframework.

api design in python

A GET request would return user information back to the client. A PUT request would update the user information, maybe updating an email address. The easiest way to secure our web service is to require clients to provide a username and a password. Unfortunately doing that here would violate the stateless requirement of REST, so instead we have to ask clients to send their authentication information with every request they send to us.

API Creation

You’ll setup a test database and perform a good number of integration tests. As we are planning to eventually release our API in the cloud, we are going to create a Dockerfile to describe what is needed to run the application on a Docker container. We need to install Docker on our development machine to test and run dockerized instances of our project. Defining a Docker recipe will help us run the API in different environments. That is, in the future, we will also install Docker and run our program on environments like production and staging. The only value that this class adds for our application is that it hardcodes the type of transaction. This type is a Python enumerator, which we still have to create, that will help us filter transactions in the future.

  • We wrapped up the chapter by showing you different ways to test the web services that we have built.
  • We will use the latter to deserialize and serialize instances of Transaction from and to JSON objects.
  • This should be enough data to allow us to envision some potential research questions without overwhelming us as we focus on the design of our API.
  • Flask is a web framework that we can use to easily build a web application.
  • JSON is the primary format in which data is passed back and forth to APIs, and most API servers will send their responses in JSON format.
  • It is so readable that I am sure you can already tell that there are two recipes here, each with an ID, name, and description.