In this tutorial, we'll create a simple todo api with Python 3 and Django 2.
Installing the requirements
Create a virtual environment and install Django.
$ virtualenv venv # creates a virtual environment
$ source venv/bin/activate # activates the virtual environment
(venv)$ pip install Django
That's all we'll need for now.
Creating the project
Use the Django startproject
command to create the project we'll be working on.
$ django-admin startproject todoapi
This creates a todoapi
directory with generated files to start us off. The directory should look something like this:
manage.py
todoapi/
__init__.py
settings.py
urls.py
wsgi.py
Databse setup
To keep things simple, we'll use the SQlite database, so we don't have to install anything since it comes with Python. In addition, that's already setup for us in todoapi/settings.py
. Have a look at the code and you should see something similar to this:
# Database
# https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/ref/settings/#databases
DATABASES = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3'),
}
}
Creating models
To create models for our database, we first need to create a todos "app". This is where we'll implement our features.
$ python manage.py startapp todos
This will create a todos
directory with the following files:
migrations/
__init__.py
__init__.py
admin.py
apps.py
models.py
tests.py
views.py
This app should be added to the todoapi/settings.py
:
INSTALLED_APPS = [
...,
'todos'
]
Ok, now that Django knows about our app, open the models.py
file to add the models. We'll only create one model called Todo
:
from django.db import models
# Create your models here.
class Todo(models.Model):
todo = models.CharField(max_length=100, null=False,
help_text="This field is required")
done = models.BooleanField(default=False)
This model will create a table for us with todo
and done
columns to save our data. The todo
column will save the actual todo, and the done
column will save the status -- whether it's done or not. Notice that it is a BooleanField
, meaning we'll save True
when done or False
when not done, which is the default.
Now all we need to do is run makemigrations
to notify Django of our models, and migrate
to do the actual migration.
$ python manage.py makemigrations todos
$ python manage.py migrate
Creating the endpoints
We'll have two endpoints for now:
-
/todos
toGET
a list of all our todos -
/todos/<id>
toGET
the todo matching the id
To test this out, we'll create two simple views in the todos/view.py
file.
from django.http import JsonResponse
from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404
from .models import Todo
# Create your views here.
def todos(request):
todos_list = Todo.objects.all()
data = {
"todos": list(todos_list.values(
"todo", "done"
))
}
return JsonResponse(data)
def single_todo(request, pk):
todo = get_object_or_404(Todo, pk=pk)
data = {
"todo": todo.todo,
"done": todo.done
}
return JsonResponse(data)
Create a new file called urls.py
in your todos
app and add the following code:
# todos/urls.py
from django.urls import path
from .views import todos, single_todo
urlpatterns = [
path("todos/", todos, name="todos"),
path("todos/<int:pk>", single_todo, name="single_todo")
]
Go to todoapi/urls.py
and include the todos url you just created:
# todoapi/urls.py
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include # add include here
urlpatterns = [
path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
path('', include('todos.urls')) # add this
]
Set up your admin and test the endpoints
Create a superuser:
$ python manage.py createsuperuser
Next, register your models in the /todos/admin.py
file so you can have access to them from the admin dashboard:
from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Todo
# Register your models here.
admin.site.register(Todo)
That's it! Now run the server and go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin
. Log in with the details you registered for the superuser above to add your todos.
You can retrieve the todos created via a rest client via the endpoints
http://127.0.0.1:8000/todos
http://127.0.0.1:8000/todos/<id>
Top comments (1)
Cool