Everything needs to be documented

What it does?

This project is a part of my dj Notes app. This is just the backend part of it, implemented using the Django rest framework. View the API here. Access the working project and frontend repository here.

Working [1/2]	Working [2/2]

Installation guide

1. Clone the repository https://github.com/mechXsteam/notes_drf.git.
2. Move into the directory in which we have manage.py file using cd.
3. Hit python manage.py runserver in the terminal to fire up the server.

Project timeline

1. Basic Project Setup

• Started the project with the Django default template.
• Run the command python manage.py migrate to create the default table in the database.
• Created an app named API to handle the API logic and added the app to the INSTALLED_APP list in the notes_backend/settings.py file.
• Created Note model and registered it in the api/admin.py file.
• Run commands python manage.py makemigrations and python manage.py migrate to create a table with the name Note in the database.
• Run the command python manage.py createsuperuser to create a superuser having access to the admin panel.

2. Configuring DRF

   find the initial steps here...

• Installed DRF using command pip install djangorestframework.
• Added rest_framework in the INSTALLED_APPS list and default rest framework permission in the api/settings.py file.
• Created a NoteSerializer in the api/serializers.py file.
• Added CRUD views in the api/views.py file.
• Created urls.py file in the API folder and added routes to access views in api/urls.py. Included the views.urls in the api/urls.py file.

3. Fixing CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing)

• Installed django-cors-headers package using the command pip install django-cors-headers.
• Added "corsheaders.middleware.CorsMiddleware", in the MIDDLEWARE list in the notes_backend/settings.py file.
• Configured CORS_ALLOW_ALL_ORIGINS: True allowing websites will all different domains to access my API.

4. Adding documentation to our API

• Installed dependencies using the command pip install pyyaml uritemplate. ref...
• Added REST_FRAMEWORK = {'DEFAULT_SCHEMA_CLASS': 'rest_framework.schemas.coreapi.AutoSchema'} in the notes_backend/settings.py file.
• Configured URLs to access the docs

  from rest_framework.documentation import include_docs_urls
  from rest_framework.schemas import get_schema_view
  
  urlpatterns = [
      path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
      path('api/', include('api.urls')),
      path('', include_docs_urls(title="DJ Notes")),
      path('schema', get_schema_view(
          title="DJ Notes",
          description="API for CRUD operations utilised by DJ Notes",
          version="1.0.0"
      ), name='openapi-schema'),
  ]

FAQs

1. What is a serializer?

   In short, it is used to convert Django queryset instances into JSON and data validation. more...

2. What is CORS and how can I fix that?

   It is a security mechanism implemented in web browsers that control how web pages from one domain are allowed to interact with resources from a different domain. By default, web browsers follow the Same-Origin Policy, which restricts JavaScript code running in a web page from making requests to a different domain. However, CORS provides a way to relax these restrictions and enable controlled cross-origin requests.
   • Origin - the source of the web page, a combination of domain, protocol and port.
   • CORS Request - when a web page makes a cross-origin request the browser sends the origin of the request in the HTTP request header.
   • Now, it is up to the server to allow the request or not. To solve the CORS error, we use django-cors-headers package in Python. Configuring this package will allow access to our API on other websites.
     find the initial steps here...