Create a simple RESTful API in 5 minutes

Before we start, we must know What is API?As you all probably know API stands for Application Programming Interface. So what is it?

According to Wikipedia, Application Programming Interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface that provides a service to other software.

If that sounds confusing, here is a simplified version of the above definition – an API is the medium through which two computer programs can “talk” to each other. Here, “chat” refers to the exchange of data.

There are many APIs in the world. Today we will talk about RESTful APIs.

We will create a RESTful API. RESTful APIs are one of many possible ways that programs, servers, and websites can share data. The RESTful API organizes data into a series of unique URLs (URIs). The data can be anything (e.g. form data, weather data, product details).

Let’s see an example to understand better:

The URL above (the API endpoint) gets the data of all burgers. If sandwiches also available in the store, then by changing the endpoint we can get the desired result.

Now you have a clear understanding of what RESTful API is.

Next, we’ll build our REST API in Python using the FAST API. FastAPI is a modern Web framework for developing RESTful APIs in Python.

Request:

Create a simple RESTful API in 5 minutes

1. Install FAST API and Uvicorn

Create a new project.

As I said earlier, we will use the FAST API framework to build the API. So install it in the project using the following command:

pip install fastapi

Once it is installed, we need to install Uvicorn – A web server implementation for python.

pip install uvicorn

2. File creation and initialization

Create a new file api.py in your project. Include the following code to initialize the file.

from fastapi import FastAPI

# Tạo API
app = FastAPI()

We have now initialized the API we need to create routes. We will create 3 routes as follows

1. Default route
2. Burgers route
3. Sandwiches route

# default route
@app.get("/")
async def root():
    return {
            "welcome_message": "Hello hungry Zucky, welcome!",
            "menu": [
                {
                    "burgers": "http://localhost:8000/api/v1/menu/burgers"
                },
                {
                    "sandwiches": "http://localhost:8000/api/v1/menu/sandwiches"
                }
            ]
    };

# burgers route
@app.get("/api/v1/menu/burgers")
async def burgers():
    return {
        "spicy burger": "10$",
        "cheesy burger": "12$",
        "Extra cheesy spicy burger": "18$"
    }

# sandwiches route
@app.get("/api/v1/menu/sandwiches")
async def burgers():
    return {
        "Egg sandwich": "10$",
        "cheesy sandwich": "11$",
        "Chicken sandwich": "13$"
    }

So you have successfully created REST API.

4. Upload to the server

To check the results, enter the following command.

uvicorn api:app --reload

This command starts the server. With the use of the –reload flag, the server will restart when it observes any new changes in your file i.e. api.py file

Enter the URL in your browser: http://127.0.0.1:8000

Conclusion

In this article, we created a simple REST API in Python using the FAST API framework. It has three routes and each returns JSON data. Furthermore, We can send JSON data to front-end as HTTP response.