How to build a REST API with Flask

Remember that you can provide both a data dump and an API, and individual users may find one or the other to better match their use case. Open Library, for example, provides both a data dump and an API, each of which serves different use cases for different users. Your users will need to perform actions other than retrieve data, such as contributing, updating, or deleting data. Your data set is large, making download via FTP unwieldy or resource-intensive.

Containers solve this problem by packaging up all of the software, restful api python flasktings and code used to execute and application within a single and sharable Docker Container. In addition, containerization enables a wide variety of different operating systems and environments to be used from a single underlying host’s operating system and infrastructure. Let’s create the authentication endpoints for login and logout.

Running the Application

Read on to use Connexion to connect your OpenAPI specification with your Flask app. One of the purposes of an API is to decouple the data from the application that uses it, thereby hiding the data implementation details. Later in this tutorial series, you’ll save your data in a database. But for the start, an in-memory data structure works fine. The REST API that you’ll be building will serve a simple people data structure where the people are keyed to the last name, and any updates are marked with a new timestamp.

Each of them serves different use cases for different users. Your users require performing actions rather than retrieving data like updating, contributing, or deletion of data. As before, we’ll examine the code more closely once you have it running. Finally, the return jsonify line takes the list of results and renders them in the browser as JSON. A prototype API for distant reading of science fiction novels. This site is a prototype API for distant reading of science fiction novels.

Designing Requests

You’ll also require a web browser and a text editor (such as Notepad++ or BBEdit). Join the growing number of people supporting Programming Historian so we can continue to share knowledge free of charge. I really don’t know what is going on, all the relevant modules in apache are running but still cannot get this to work.

Will be printed on the server first and then the function for the hello endpoint will be executed. This is particularly useful when you want to log the requests for monitoring purposes. If the data in the request body is valid, you update PEOPLE in line 13 and respond with the new object and a 201 HTTP code in line 18.