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HTTP implements a number of “methods,” which tell which direction data is moving and what should happen to it. The two most common are GET, which pulls data from a server, and POST, which pushes new data to a server. Your users only need access to a part of the data at any one time. If you’ve heard the term API before, chances are it’s been used not to refer to APIs in general, but instead to a specific kind of API, the web API. A web API allows for information or functionality to be manipulated by other programs via the internet.
In this section, you create two endpoints to GET resources from your API. This How To Become a Java Developer section may refer to these endpoints as the list and details endpoints.
ASP.NET Web API (C#/.NET) API Tutorials
FastAPI returns a JSON list including the new country you just added. The response contains the information for the first Country. Feel free to try out PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests on your own to see how you can fully manage your model from the REST API. The responses above work well when everything goes as planned, but what happens if there’s a problem with the request? In the next section, you’ll look at how your REST API should respond when errors occur. In this section, you’ll look at some example HTTP responses for a hypothetical API that manages an inventory of cars. These examples will give you a sense of how you should format your API responses.
We added a new static method auth_required to Authentication class and we wrapped it using wraps imported from python functools. We set up a condition that checks if api-token exist in the request header, a user will need to attached the token gotten from creating How to Become a Cybersecurity Specialist Updated for an account or the one gotten from logging in. We returned back to the user an error message if the token is not valid. If you see the above snippet, you can see that we have defined a new class with the name “Users” and initialized some methods inside the class.
Define Your Endpoints
In this article, we have understood what a REST API is and how to create one using Flask in Python. The example demonstrated in the article is quite a simple one and it can be extended from here to implement multiple classes, endpoints, and security features. REST APIs are an excellent way of communication between multiple systems and I think every engineer should have a solid foundation and understanding of how these APIs work. You can also verify the users.csv file if the data has been added to it.
Data transformation between the database and a JSON representation. The code is long, but the code is easier to understand, and it is a relatively simple file operation. Since the name is already sent through the URL request, We need to send the price and author JSON. Since we have only book1, it is showing only 1 object in the list. Let’s say, I send data about a Book – ” A Brief History Of Time ” by Stephen Hawkings using the POST method. Try making intentional errors in the editor, like misspelling a Last Name, and see the errors generated by the API represented on the web application.
Building a simple REST API with Python and Flask
Another area in which an improvement could be made is in handling multiple users. If the system supports multiple users the authentication credentials sent by the client could be used to obtain user specific to do lists. In such a system we would have a second resource, which would be the users. A POST request on the users resource would represent a new user registering for the service. A GET request would return user information back to the client.
- With these two ideas, we have a way to take common application actions on something uniquely identified on the web.
- Two popular options for formatting web service data are XML and JSON.
- Here we imported Bcrypt from flask_bcrypt and intialize it in this src/models/__init__.py file.
- The responses above work well when everything goes as planned, but what happens if there’s a problem with the request?
- Navigate back to sandbox which is root and create a file app.py.