Django REST framework is a powerful and flexible toolkit for building Web APIs.

Requirements

• Python 3.7
• Django 3.1
• Django REST Framework

Installation

After you clone the repository, you want to create a virtual environment, so you have a clean python installation. You can do this by running the command.

python -m venv env

After this, it is necessary to activate the virtual environment, you can get more information about this here

You can install all the required dependencies by running.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Structure

In a RESTful API, endpoints (URLs) define the structure of the API and how end users access data from our application using the HTTP methods - GET, POST, PUT, DELETE.

In our case, we have one single resource, store, so we will use the following URLS - /store/products/ and /store/collections/ for getting the list of products and their respective collections.

Endpoint	HTTP Method	CRUD Method	Result
store	GET	READ	Get all Api Root
store/products/	GET	READ	Get all products
store/collections/	GET	READ	Get all collections
store/products/:id	POST	CREATE	Create a new product
store/products/:id	PUT	UPDATE	Update a product
store/products/:id	DELETE	DELETE	Delete a product

Use

We can test the API using Postman.

Postman, it is an HTTP client that tests HTTP requests, utilizing a graphical user interface, through which we obtain different types of responses that need to be subsequently validated.

First, we have to start up Django's development server.

python manage.py runserver

Only authenticated users can use the API services, for that reason, we use this to create an account:

http  http://127.0.0.1:8000/auth/users

Create users and Tokens

After we create an account we can use those credentials to get a token

To get a token first we need to request.

http http://127.0.0.1:8000/auth/jwt/create
username="username" password="password"

after that, we get the token. Something like this.

{
    "refresh": "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ0b2tlbl90eXBlIjoicmVmcmVzaCIsImV4cCI6MTYxNjI5MjMyMSwianRpIjoiNGNkODA3YTlkMmMxNDA2NWFhMzNhYzMxOTgyMzhkZTgiLCJ1c2VyX2lkIjozfQ.hP1wPOPvaPo2DYTC9M1AuOSogdRL_mGP30CHsbpf4zA",
    "access": "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ0b2tlbl90eXBlIjoiYWNjZXNzIiwiZXhwIjoxNjE2MjA2MjIxLCJqdGkiOiJjNTNlNThmYjE4N2Q0YWY2YTE5MGNiMzhlNjU5ZmI0NSIsInVzZXJfaWQiOjN9.Csz-SgXoItUbT3RgB3zXhjA2DAv77hpYjqlgEMNAHps"
}

We got two tokens, the access token will be used to authenticate all the requests we need to make, this access token will expire after a day.

` The API has some restrictions:

• The store are always associated with the admins or users with neccessary permissions.
• Only authenticated users may read and see store products and their collections.
• Only the admin or users with necessary permissions may update or delete it.
• The API doesn't allow unauthenticated requests.