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

Understanding routing in FastAPI

A route is defined to accept requests from an HTTP request method and optionally take parameters. When a request is sent to a route, the application checks whether the route is defined before processing the request in the route handler. On the other hand, a route handler is a function that processes the request sent to the server. An example of a route handler is a function that retrieves records from a database when a request is sent to a router via a route.

What are HTTP request methods?

HTTP methods are identifiers for indicating the type of action to be carried out. The standard methods include GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. You can learn more about HTTP methods at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Methods.

Routing example

In the Project scaffolding section in the previous chapter, we built a single route application. The routing was handled by the FastAPI() instance initiated in the app variable:

from fastapi...