Creating a production ready API with Python and Django Rest Framework - part 1

The aim if this tutorial is to show how to create a production ready solution for a REST API, using Python and Django Rest Framework. I will show you how to first create a very basic API, how to handle the authentication and permissions and I will cover deployment and hosting of images. The full source code of the tutorial is available at: https://github.com/andreagrandi/drf-tutorial

Summary of the complete tutorial

1. Create the basic structure for the API
2. Add Authentication and POST methods
3. Handling details and changes to existing data
4. Testing the API
5. Switching from Sqlite to PostgreSQL
6. Hosting the API on Heroku
7. Add an Image field and save images to S3

Create the basic structure for the API

For this tutorial I will assume you have correctly installed at least Python (I will use Python 2.7.x), virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper on your system and I will explain how to create everything else step by step.

Note: at the time of writing, the tutorial has been based on Django 1.10.1 and Django Rest Framework 3.4.7

Creating the main project structure

mkdir drf-tutorial
mkvirtualenv drf-tutorial
cd drf-tutorial
pip install django djangorestframework
django-admin.py startproject drftutorial .
cd drftutorial
django-admin.py startapp catalog

Data Model

We will create the API for a generic products catalog, using a very simple structure (to keep things simple). Edit the file catalog/models.py adding these lines:

from __future__ import unicode_literals
from django.db import models


class Product(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    description = models.TextField()
    price = models.DecimalField(decimal_places=2, max_digits=20)

You can find the rest of the tutorial on my blog https://www.andreagrandi.it/2016/09/28/creating-production-ready-api-python-django-rest-framework-part-1/