Book Image

Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI

By : Abdulazeez
Book Image

Building Python Web APIs with FastAPI

By: Abdulazeez

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

Using Jinja templates in FastAPI

To get started, we need to install the Jinja package and create a new folder, templates, in our project directory. This folder will store all our Jinja files, which are HTML files mixed with Jinja’s syntax. Since this book does not focus on user interface design, we will be making use of the CSS Bootstrap library and avoid writing our own styles.

The Bootstrap library will be downloaded from the CDN upon page load. However, extra assets can be stored in a different folder. We will look into serving static files in the next chapter.

We’ll start by creating the homepage template, which will house the section for creating new todos. The following is a mockup of how we want our homepage template to look:

Figure 4.1 – Mockup of our homepage template

  1. First, let’s install the Jinja package and create the templates folder:
    (venv)$ pip install jinja2
    (venv)$ mkdir templates
  2. In the newly created...