Lab 2.1 - FastAPI Setup

DATE:

Friday, March 29, 2024

TAGS:

fastapi

python

rest-api

FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3 based on standard Python type hints. It is easy to use, fast to code, and easy to learn. In this step, we will create a simple Python backend using FastAPI that returns a list of students present in our class.

Objective

Create a Python backend using Rest API that returns a list of students present in the our class.

The API should be accessible at http://localhost:5000/students.
The API should return a JSON response with the following format:

{
  "students": [
    {
      "name": "Mehrshad Lotfi",
      "email": "mehrshad@optiop.org"
    },
    {
      "name": "Reza Mohammadi",
      "email": "reza@optiop.org"
    }
  ]
}

Instructions

Step 1

We checkout the documentation of FastAPI: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/ Under the section, installation, we see that we can install FastAPI using pip:

pip install fastapi
pip install "uvicorn[standart]"

Step 2

From the FastAPI documentation, we get example code under example section:

from typing import Union

from fastapi import FastAPI

app = FastAPI()


@app.get("/")
def read_root():
    return {"Hello": "World"}


@app.get("/items/{item_id}")
def read_item(item_id: int, q: Union[str, None] = None):
    return {"item_id": item_id, "q": q}

We run the example code using the following command:

uvicorn main:app --reload

Step 3

We test the API using the following urls:

Step 4

We modify the code to return the list of students:

@app.get("/")
def read_root():
    return {
	  "students": [
	    {
	      "name": "Mehrshad Lotfi",
	      "email": "mehrshad@optiop.org"
	    },
	    {
	      "name": "Reza Mohammadi",
	      "email": "reza@optiop.org"
	    }
	  ]
	}

Step 5

We run the code again using the following command:

uvicorn main:app --reload

Step 6

We test the API using the following url:

http://localhost:8000/

The API is working as expected, but not on our desired port. We need to change the port to 5000.

Step 7

We go through the documentation https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/de/deployment/manually/

uvicorn main:app --reload --port 5000