flask-api-template

This repository provides the basic tools for creating a Python REST API powered by Flask.

What does it set-up for you?

This repo helps you quickly bootstrap a REST API using Flask. It also sets up the following things for you.

• File and code structure with one sample endpoint.
• requirements.txt already set up with everything you need to create a working virtual environment.
• A tests package for testing your API endpoints.
• A root python file (index.py) which makes launching your app simple on both your local machine and on some sort of serverless compute environment.
• GitHub Actions workflow to test and lint your application with flake8.
• A license.

What does it NOT set-up for you?

We don't do everything for you, because your project requirements might be different than ours. We don't:

• Set-up any sort of serverless deployment via GitHub actions, I personally love AWS Lambda, but you may prefer some other cloud provider.
• Set-up tox to quickly test and lint your application on your local machine. Although tox is awesome and you should do this.
• Set-up any sort of static analysis tool. Python3 has types and you should use them, should you decide to type your code, using a tool like mypy for static analysis and type-checking is awesome and you should consider doing this.
• Differentiate between application dependencies and development dependencies, it can be beneficial to do this, especially if you are deploying your app to a cloud provider, you can reduce your application's size this way.

Setup

This codebase uses Python3.7.X/Python3.8.X. These setup instructions are for macOS using Homebrew.

Installing these dependencies should be similar for other platforms with the appropriate package managers for that platform.

Python3 Installation

1. Install python.

   brew install python
   sudo pip3 install virtualenv

Environment Setup

These steps are required for development.

1. Create a Python virtual environment.

   virtualenv -p python3 venv

2. Activate the environment.

   . venv/bin/activate

3. Install Python dependencies.

   pip3 install -r requirements.txt

4. Run the flask application locally.

   python3 index.py

   Development Mode (Auto reloads on code changes):

   export FLASK_ENV=development
   
   python3 index.py

Testing

You can quickly and easily run all the unit tests locally on your machine with the following command.

python -m unittest discover tests