Building APIs is a crucial aspect of modern software development, and FastAPI is a popular Python web framework that makes it easier than ever to build high-performance APIs. With its automatic data validation, serialization, and documentation, FastAPI can help developers save time and build robust APIs. In addition, Uvicorn, a lightning-fast ASGI server, can provide high concurrency and great performance for running Python web applications.
Install Required Libraries
To start building our API, we'll need to install FastAPI and Uvicorn using the pip install command.
pip install fastapi uvicorn
Define the API Endpoints
FastAPI provides a simple and intuitive syntax for defining API endpoints. We can define our endpoints in a single Python file using FastAPI's 'FastAPI' class and decorators for HTTP methods. Here's an example:
from fastapi import FastAPI
app = FastAPI()
@app.get("/hello")
def hello(name: str = ""):
return {"message": f"Hello {name}"}
This code defines endpoint '/hello' that responds to GET requests with JSON data that has a 'message' key.
Run the API
To run the API, we can use Uvicorn to start a development server:
import uvicorn
if __name__ == "__main__":
uvicorn.run(app, host="0.0.0.0", port=8000)
This code starts a development server on port 8000 that listens for incoming requests. You can the server by running the Python file.
Test the API
We can test the API using any HTTP client, such as 'curl', 'request', or a web browser. For example, to test the '/hello' endpoint, we can use our command line and run:
curl http://localhost:8000/hello?name=john
This will return the JSON object we defined earlier, It will look like this: {"message": "Hello john"}.
And that's it! You have successfully built your first running endpoint on your API using Python, now all that is left is to add as many endpoints as you want.
You can define endpoints for different types of requests such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc. each with its own set of functionalities.
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