Book Image

Python API Development Fundamentals

By : Jack Chan, Ray Chung, Jack Huang
Book Image

Python API Development Fundamentals

By: Jack Chan, Ray Chung, Jack Huang

Overview of this book

Python is a flexible language that can be used for much more than just script development. By knowing the Python RESTful APIs work, you can build a powerful backend for web applications and mobile applications using Python. You'll take your first steps by building a simple API and learning how the frontend web interface can communicate with the backend. You'll also learn how to serialize and deserialize objects using the marshmallow library. Then, you'll learn how to authenticate and authorize users using Flask-JWT. You'll also learn how to enhance your APIs by adding useful features, such as email, image upload, searching, and pagination. You'll wrap up the whole book by deploying your APIs to the cloud. By the end of this book, you'll have the confidence and skill to leverage the power of RESTful APIs and Python to build efficient web applications.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Deployment

What is deployment for? The API application we wrote earlier just runs the code on the local machine. Using one of the ports on the local machine, we can send the request from the client to the local server. This is good for development purpose. We can quickly test and adjust our application in a development environment. However, our local machine is not intended to be a server; others can't access it. And they cannot send HTTP requests to APIs hosted on our local machine.

If we want to open this API service to external users, we need to host it on a server. The server should be connected to the internet, with a domain and URL that allow others to access it.

Moving an application from a local machine to a server that runs on the internet is called deployment. This will involve work such as environment setting, dependent package installation, and building a web server.