APIs and API Design with Python

In this step, we’ll learn the basics of how Flask works and make sure our software is configured correctly. Once we have a small Flask application working in the form of a home page, we’ll iterate on this site, turning it into a functioning API. Next you will learn how to set up testing for the application using the pytest library. You’ll setup a test database and perform a good number of integration tests. The API built in this course is for a social-media-type application where users can create/read/delete/update posts as well as like other users posts.

REST is a philosophy that describes some best practices for implementing APIs. APIs designed with some or all of these principles in mind are called REST APIs. While the API outlined in this lesson uses some REST principles, there is a great deal of disagreement around this term. For this reason, I do not describe the example APIs here as REST APIs, but instead as web or HTTP APIs.

Installing Flask

Hug leverages Python3 annotations to automatically validate and convert incoming and outgoing API parameters. Falcon is a fast and lightweight framework well suited to create RESTful APIs. Restless is a lightweight API framework that aims to be framework agnostic.

We will start improving it in a second, but first, let’s create an executable file called bootstrap. As we will use this file to check if Flask was correctly installed, we don’t need to nest it in a new directory.

Section 8: Authentication & Users

Each section should have an example in the form of a sample HTTP request or block of code. Another way to plan for your API’s future is to add a version number to the path. This way, applications and scripts built using the old version of your API won’t cease to function after your upgrade.

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. As we have seen, however, exploring an API can be a useful first step in gathering data to tackle a research question. Even though Django is older and has a slightly more extensive community, Flask has its strengths. From the ground up, Flask was built with scalability and simplicity. Flask applications are known for being lightweight, mainly compared to their Django counterparts. Flask developers call it a microframework, where micro means that the goal is to keep the core simple but extensible.

Running the Application

The general concept is that you can use the same API code for Django, Flask, Bottle, Pyramid or any other WSGI framework with minimal porting effort. It was originally open sourced by Twilio then moved into itsown GitHub organizationso engineers from outside the company could be core contributors. 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. The difference is that it transforms the given amount to be negative. Therefore, no matter if the user sends a positive or a negative value, we will always store it as negative to facilitate calculations. In this script, we will define the first endpoint of our application. History Data Service – A collection of data from a wide variety of historical sources. All requests we make to the API must begin with this portion of the URL. All APIs have a base URL like this one that is the same across all requests to the API.