Data Transfer Objects DTOs In Litestar | Building APIs with Litestar #6

Litestar DTOs (Data Transfer Objects) are a powerful feature in the Litestar framework.They act as an intelligent transformation layer between:

• the raw data your API receives from clients (JSON payloads, form data, etc.)
• your internal domain/business models (Pydantic models, dataclasses, msgspec structs, SQLAlchemy models, etc.)
• and the responses you send back.

Instead of manually converting, filtering, renaming fields, or doing partial updates in every handler, you define rules once in a DTO and Litestar automatically handles validation, conversion, field exclusion/inclusion, renaming (e.g. snake_case ↔ camelCase), partial updates, and even OpenAPI schema generation.