Flask-Restful.MD

###Introduction Flask restful is an extension for Flask that adds support for quickly building a REST API's. The Flask Restful Framework is lightweight and works with existing libraries and encourages best practices with minimal setup.

###Installation Install Flask-Restful with pip

pip install flask-restful

See further installation directions at: flask-restful.readthedocs.org

###A simple API using Flask Restful This shows a very simple API using Flask Restful. This code should be sufficient to get you going.

from flask import Flask
from flask.ext import restful
from flask import request
import json

app = Flask(__name__)
api = restful.Api(app)
name = "JohnnyRotten"


class NameAPI(restful.Resource):
  def get(self):
    return {'name': name}
  
  def post(self):
    data = json.loads(request.data)
    if data['name'] != None:
      name = data['name']
      return 'ok', 200
    else:
      return 'Bad request', 404

api.add_resource(NameAPI, '/api/name')

if __name__ == '__main__':
  app.run(debug=True)

###Trying it out Trying out the API for the first time can be done with curl should return the name Johnny Rotten as shown below.

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/name
{"name": "JohnnyRotten"}

You can try out posting to your simple API by using curl

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"name":"SidVicious"}' http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/name

Should return 200 OK

If you now curl the API the name received should be SidVicious.

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/name
{"name": "SidVicious"}

###Troubles If the server is hanging on request it might be a good idea to add the the threaded=True to the app.run()

app.run(threaded=True)

###Deployment When the server is ready to be deployed to production it is necessary to wrap it into apache by using the mod_wgsi. Instructions for using flask under Apache can be found at: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/deploying/mod_wsgi/

###Good tutorials for flask restful: http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/designing-a-restful-api-with-python-and-flask

###Documentation Flask documentation can be found at: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/

Flask restful documentation can be found at: http://flask-restful.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html