Rest API Complete Guide on Rest API with Python and Flask

Make sure to use 201 Created instead of 200 OK for all successful POST requests. Once you’ve picked a data format, the next step is to decide how you’ll respond to HTTP requests. All responses from your REST API should have a similar format and include the proper HTTP status code. The first step you’ll take as you build a REST API is to identify the resources the API will manage. It’s common to describe these resources as plural nouns, like customers, events, or transactions.

Part of the app instance creation includes the parameter specification_dir in line 6. This tells Connexion which directory to look in for its configuration file. In this case, it’s the same directory that you run app.py restful api python flask from. In the next sections, you’ll expand the project and add your first REST API endpoints. With the commands shown above, you create and activate a virtual environment named venv by using Python’s built-in venv module.

Add Dependencies

Building web services with Flask is surprisingly simple, much simpler than building complete server side applications like the one I built in the Mega-Tutorial. The next step is to select the resources that will be exposed by this service. This is an extremely simple application, we only have tasks, so our only resource will be the tasks in our to do list. 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. The structure for post looks similar to the existing get schema.

An application sending requests to the API can check the status code and perform actions based on the result. These actions could include handling errors or displaying a success message to a user. Explanation ~ In the above code, we first load required parent classes, then initialize our app and API.

Table of contents

The parenthesized (venv) in front of the prompt indicate that you’ve successfully activated the virtual environment. In this case, you name the root folder of your project rp_flask_api/. The files and folders that you create over the course of this series will be located in either this folder or its subfolders. Open the POSTMAN API tool and hit on each HTTP method request. First, when we use post request using Name, it gives us a name. It is deleted on deleting, and when you try to get it back again, it will give you NULL.

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. You can also verify the users.csv file if the data has been added to it. This will run the web application on the development server.

E) Python Modules

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. These are methods to implement the get, post, and delete methods to perform operations on the CSV file. Once the class is created and the methods defined, Flask needs to know which endpoint this particular class should bind to. In other words, when the “/users” endpoint is called, Flask needs to know, which class should it route to in order to execute the requested operation.

• Flask is a popular micro framework that is used for building web applications.
• You can see this above, where several tags are nested inside of .
• Python is a beautiful programming language having a wide variety of usages.
• With these options set, curl sends JSON data in a POST request with the Content-Type header set to application/json.
• If this command produces the correct output, we must replace all commands throughout the article to use python3 instead of just python.
• The version string is important because some parts of the OpenAPI structure may change over time.