REST API WITH FLASK-RESTLESS AND sqlalchemy

Summary

• This is a simple CRUD APP project that shows how to auto-generate a REST API from a handful of SQLalchemy models. This means full CRUD (POST, GET, PUT, DELETE) endpoint generation for each SQLalchemy model defined.

• Big shout out and thank you to Sean Harrington at http://thelaziestprogrammer.com/sharrington/web-development/sqlalchemy-defined-rest-api

Environment Set up

1. Create a project in the root directory mkdir automagic_api

2. Create and activate a virtualenv cd automagic_api;

   #virtualenv env; latest version of Python and pip

   source env/bin/activate

3. Install flask_restless and sqlalchemy

   • pip install flask-restless sqlalchemy

Start and test your API!

In the project root, start the server

env/bin/python run.py

In a python CLI (I chose to use ipython), create a POST request to create a new Book:

import requests import json payload = { 'title': "The Eye of the World", 'author': { 'first_name': "Robert", 'last_name': "Jordan" },
'is_available': True } headers = {'content-type': 'application/json'} r = requests.post("http://localhost:5000/api/book", data=json.dumps(payload),headers=headers) print r.status_code 201

Open A Web Browser

Go ahead and open up a web browser, and navigate to http://localhost:5000/api/book to see the Book object that you just POSTed to your sqlite database.

Likewise, you can invert this request and check out http://localhost:5000/api/author to see the Author object that was created, and the nested “books” attribute that the author has written.

Note: URLs for the API are constructed based off of the tablename of the sqlalchemy model, and are prefixed with “/api” (i.e Book -> “/api/book”)

Finished!

Congratulations, you now have a working boilerplate for a SQLAlchemy-model defined REST API. Now go ahead and add more models and endpoints!