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FastAPI Introduction Part-1

Introduction

  • FastAPI is one of the easiest and fastest frameworks available for Python 3.6+.
  • Its general use case is for the backend mainly, that is for building API’S.
  • Performance is very high as compared to other python frameworks such as Django and Flask.
  • As it is basically designed for developing the API’S so the loc(lines of code) is very less as compared to others.
  • Debugging is also very easy.
  • It is a robust framework.
  • All the basic standards of the API are followed.
  • Reusability of the code is easy to implement.
  • It is the most modern API framework available in python.
  • Swagger is by default available in FastAPI, it is the most useful feature available for the API’S visualization.
  • ReDocs is also provided if someone doesn’t want to use the swagger.
  • For the CLI Application Typer can be used, it is similar to the FastAPI.
  • Pydantic library is supported by default you can type hints.
  • It supports JSON Schema.
  • By default, the return type will always be JSON.
  • Autocomplete feature is also supported.
  • Plugins are also supported.
  • Starlette feature of python is also supported.

Requirements

Demo Application

  • Let’s get our hands dirty, and start building our dummy application.
  • Let’s create a folder named FastAPI, in it, we are going to have the main file and a requirement.txt file.
  • In the requirement.txt file, we are going to have all the packages that are required in this application.
  • Let’s install all the packages at one – pip install -r requirements.txt, this command will install the packages that are present in the requirements.txt file.
  • Now, let’s write the code for our first API.
  • In the main.py let’s import FastAPI from fastapi.
  • we will initialize our app variable by this instance of FastAPI.
  • Let’s create a function first_api that returns a normal dictionary {“Hello” : “World”}
  • We will decorate this function by app.get inside this method we will pass the routing path.
  • Now, let’s run our application using the following command uvicorn main:app –reload
  • Now our app is up and running let’s open our localhost on the browser.
  • And here is the result of your API, this is how simple it is to create an API in the FastAPI framework.
  • Now let’s talk about the code- the command to run the app – uvicorn main:app ==reload
  • Uvicorn is a lightning-fast ASGI server implementation, using uvloop and httptools use to run the application
  • Main is the file where we have created the instance of FastAPI.
  • It can be of any name then you just need to change the name of the main to your preferred name in the app running command.
  • app is the name of the variable to which we have created the instance of the FlaskAPI.
  • It can also be of any name, you just need to provide that in the app running command.
  • The decorator app.get, where app is the instance while get is the method of the API, it can be delete, post, put etc.

Routing

  • Let’s see how we can create a dynamic routing.
  • So for that let’s assume we are creating an employee’s application, where we need to search a employee by it’s ID.
  • so for that we just need to update our app.get() to app.get(‘/employee/{id}’), so for the dynamic path, we use {} braces.
  • now we just need to pass that dynamic variable in the function decorated by the app instance.
  • By default the type is of string, we can also change it by just writing variable_name : data_type, example – id : int.
  • By this, it will now take it as int.
  • Now the question comes is what will happen if we pass a string instead of int, Let see what happens.
  • So this is one of the best features of FastAPI, it shows you the error message. It is handled by the Pydantic.
  • Pydantic official documentation https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/.
  • This is how easy it is to use the FastAPI.

Swagger and ReDocs

  • For connecting to the swagger – we just need to go the docs URL, that is – http://localhost:8000/docs
  • Similary for redocs – http://localhost:8000/redoc
  • It is just a route you need to remember for using both of them rather then writing a whole code for using swagger or redocs like you have to do in Django or Flask.

Conclusion

  • In this part, we have covered the basics of FastAPI, what are the advantages, how to use it.
  • In the next part, we will deep dive into more concepts such as making connections between the DB’s and CRUD operations.

References

Disrupting the Tech World: Product Owner at NerdyBio, Python Powerhouse, AWS Ace & Prolific Tech Blogger 💻💥

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