Create a Simple API with Python and Flask

https://github.com/dcs-ink/simple-api-python-flask

I recently requested my data from Indeed because I was curious about the statistics with my recent job search.

I've worked plenty with APIs, but never built one from scratch. I decided to create a simple one using Python and Flask.

It's simple really, only consists of two files - the python script and the json file.

jobs.json
job_api.py

Here's a snippet example of the json file I received from Indeed.

[
    {
      "title" : "Job Title",
      "company" : "CoolCompany",
      "location" : "Cool City, COOL",
      "date" : "date timestamp"
    }
]

Mine had something like 300 entries, but the point remains the same.

Here's the python script

import json
from flask import Flask, jsonify

app = Flask(__name__)

jobs_data = []
try:
    with open('jobs.json', 'r') as f:
        jobs_data = json.load(f)
    print(f"Successfully loaded {len(jobs_data)} jobs from jobs.json")
except FileNotFoundError:
    print("Error: jobs.json not found!")
except json.JSONDecodeError:
    print("Error: jobs.json is not valid JSON!")

@app.route('/api/jobs', methods=['GET'])
def get_all_jobs():
    return jsonify(jobs_data)

@app.route('/api/jobs/titles', methods=['GET'])
def get_job_titles():
    titles = [job['title'] for job in jobs_data]
    return jsonify(titles)

@app.route('/api/jobs/companies', methods=['GET'])
def get_job_companies():
    if not jobs_data:
        return jsonify({"error": "No job data available"}), 500
    companies = list(set(job.get('company', 'N/A') for job in jobs_data))
    return jsonify(companies)

@app.route('/api/jobs/location', methods=['GET'])
def get_job_locations():
    if not jobs_data:
        return jsonify({"error": "No job data available"}), 500
    locations = list(set(job.get('location') for job in jobs_data))
    return jsonify(locations)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True, port=8080)

Steps to make it work.
After setup and activating a virtual environment...

1. pip install flask
2. pip install jsonify
3. Create python file and paste above python code
4. Create json file and paste above json code
5. Run python script sudo python3 job_api.py
6. Use curl to test

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/api/jobs

Response

[
    {
        "company": "CoolCompany",
        "date": "date timestamp",
        "location": "Cool City, COOL",
        "title": "Job Title"
    }
]