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

Chapter 6: Connecting to a Database

In the last chapter, we looked at how to structure a FastAPI application. We successfully implemented some routes and models for our application and tested the endpoints. However, the application still uses an in-app database to store the events. In this chapter, we will migrate the application to use a proper database.

A database can be simply referred to as a storehouse for data. In this context, a database enables us to store data permanently, as opposed to an in-app database, which is wiped off upon any app restart or crash. A database is a table housing columns, referred to as fields, and rows, referred to as records.

By the end of this chapter, you will be equipped with the knowledge of how to connect a FastAPI application to a database. This chapter will explain how to connect to a SQL database using SQLModel and a MongoDB database via Beanie. (However, the application will make use of MongoDB as its primary database in later chapters...