Book Image

Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI

By : Abdulazeez Abdulazeez Adeshina
Book Image

Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI

By: Abdulazeez Abdulazeez Adeshina

Overview of this book

RESTful web services are commonly used to create APIs for web-based applications owing to their light weight and high scalability. This book will show you how FastAPI, a high-performance web framework for building RESTful APIs in Python, allows you to build robust web APIs that are simple and intuitive and makes it easy to build quickly with very little boilerplate code. This book will help you set up a FastAPI application in no time and show you how to use FastAPI to build a REST API that receives and responds to user requests. You’ll go on to learn how to handle routing and authentication while working with databases in a FastAPI application. The book walks you through the four key areas: building and using routes for create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations; connecting the application to SQL and NoSQL databases; securing the application built; and deploying your application locally or to a cloud environment. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed a solid understanding of the FastAPI framework and be able to build and deploy robust REST APIs.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Part 1: An Introduction to FastAPI
6
Part 2: Building and Securing FastAPI Applications
10
Part 3: Testing And Deploying FastAPI Applications

Unit testing with pytest

Unit testing is a testing procedure where individual components of an application are tested. This form of testing enables us to verify the working capability of individual components. For example, unit tests are employed in testing individual routes in an application to ensure the proper responses are returned.

In this chapter, we’ll be making use of pytest, a Python testing library, to conduct our unit testing operations. Although Python comes with a unit testing library called unittest built in, the pytest library has a shorter syntax and is more preferred for testing applications. Let’s install pytest and write our first sample test.

Let’s install the pytest library:

(venv)$ pip install pytest

Next, create a folder called tests that will house the test files for our application:

(venv)$ mkdir tests && cd 
(venv)$ touch __init__.py

Individual test filenames, during creation, will be prefixed with test_. This...