How to Build a REST API in Python

In this webstory, we will learn how to build a REST API in Python. We will use the Flask framework, which is a popular Python framework for creating web applications.

pip install flask

The first step is to install the Flask framework. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal:

Once Flask is installed, we can create a new Python file for our REST API. We will call this file api.py.

The next step is to define the routes for our REST API. A route is a URL that maps to a specific function in our API.

@app.route ('/users') def get_users():   return jsonify(users)

For example, the following code defines a route that returns all the users in our database:

The @app.route( ) decorator tells Flask that this function is a route. The /users part of the decorator is the URL that the route maps to. The get_users( ) function is the function that is called when this route is requested.

The jsonify( ) function converts the data in the users variable to JSON format. JSON is a standard format for exchanging data between computers.

The final step is to run our REST API. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal:

flask run

http://localhost:5000/users

Our REST API is now running on our local computer. We can test it by opening a web browser and navigating to the URL