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

Setting up Docker

As our application grows into having multiple layers, such as a database, coupling the application into a single piece enables us to deploy our application. We’ll be using Docker to containerize our application layers into a single image, which can then be easily deployed locally or in the cloud.

Additionally, using a Dockerfile and a docker-compose file eliminates the need to upload and share images of our applications. New versions of our applications can be built from the Dockerfile and deployed using the docker-compose file. Application images can also be stored and retrieved from Docker Hub. This is known as a push and pull operation.

To begin setting up, download and install Docker from https://docs.docker.com/install.

Dockerfile

A Dockerfile contains instructions on how our application image is to be built. The following is an example Dockerfile:

FROM PYTHON:3.8
# Set working directory to /usr/src/app
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
# Copy the contents of the current local directory into the container's working directory
ADD . /usr/src/app
# Run a command
CMD ["python", "hello.py"]

Next, we’ll build the application container image and tag it getting_started as follows:

$ docker build -t getting_started .

If the Dockerfile isn’t present in the directory where the command is being run, the path to the Dockerfile should be properly appended as follows:

$ docker build -t api api/Dockerfile

The container image can be run using the following command:

$ docker run getting-started

Docker is an efficient tool for containerization. We have only looked at the basic operations and we’ll learn more operations practically in Chapter 9, Deploying FastAPI Applications.