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 (16 chapters)
Title Page
www.PacktPub.com
About the Author
Preface

Installing Django and Django REST frameworks in an isolated environment


We have created and activated a lightweight virtual environment. It is time to run many commands that will be the same for either Linux, macOS, or Windows.

First, run the following command to install the Django web framework:

pip install django==1.11.5

The last lines of the output will indicate that the django package has been successfully installed. The process will also install the pytz package that provides world time zone definitions. Take into account that you may also see a notice to upgrade pip. The next lines show a sample of the four last lines of the output generated by a successful pip installation:

Collecting djangoCollecting pytz (from django)Installing collected packages: pytz, djangoSuccessfully installed django-1.11.5 pytz-2017.2

Now that we have installed the Django web framework, we can install Django REST framework. Django REST framework works on top of Django and provides us with a powerful and flexible toolkit to build RESTful Web Services. We just need to run the following command to install this package:

pip install djangorestframework==3.6.4

The last lines for the output will indicate that the djangorestframework package has been successfully installed, as shown here:

Collecting djangorestframeworkInstalling collected packages: djangorestframeworkSuccessfully installed djangorestframework-3.6.4

After following the previous steps, we will have Django REST framework 3.6.4 and Django 1.11.5 installed in our virtual environment. We will install additional packages as we need them in the forthcoming chapters.