Book Image

Django RESTful Web Services

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Django RESTful Web Services

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Django is a Python web framework that makes the web development process very easy. It reduces the amount of trivial code, which simplifies the creation of web applications and results in faster development. It is very powerful and a great choice for creating RESTful web services. If you are a Python developer and want to efficiently create RESTful web services with Django for your apps, then this is the right book for you. The book starts off by showing you how to install and configure the environment, required software, and tools to create RESTful web services with Django and the Django REST framework. We then move on to working with advanced serialization and migrations to interact with SQLite and non-SQL data sources. We will use the features included in the Django REST framework to improve our simple web service. Further, we will create API views to process diverse HTTP requests on objects, go through relationships and hyperlinked API management, and then discover the necessary steps to include security and permissions related to data models and APIs. We will also apply throttling rules and run tests to check that versioning works as expected. Next we will run automated tests to improve code coverage. By the end of the book, you will be able to build RESTful web services with Django.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Installing the Required Software and Tools

In this chapter, we will start our journey towards creating RESTful Web Services with Python and its most popular web framework: Django. Python is one of the most popular and versatile programming languages. There are thousands of Python packages, which allow you to extend Python capabilities to any kind of domain you can imagine. You can work with Django and packages to easily build simple and complex RESTful Web Services with Python that can run on your favorite platform.

We will leverage your existing knowledge of Python and all of its packages to code the different pieces of your RESTful Web Services and their ecosystem. We will use object-oriented features to create code that is easier to maintain, understand, and reuse. We don't need to learn another programming language, we can use the one we already know and love: Python.

In this chapter, we will install and configure the environments and the required software and tools to create RESTful Web Services with Django and Django REST framework. We will learn the necessary steps in Linux, macOS, and Windows. We will gain an understanding of the following:

  • Creating a virtual environment with Python 3.x and PEP 405
  • Understanding the directory structure for a virtual environment
  • Activating the virtual environment
  • Deactivating the virtual environment
  • Installing Django and Django REST framework in an isolated environment
  • Creating an app with Django
  • Understanding Django folders, files, and configurations
  • Installing Curl
  • Installing HTTPie
  • Installing the Postman REST client
  • Installing Stoplight
  • Installing iCurlHTTP