Flask-RESTful-Swagger: Documented best practices for building RESTful APIs in Python

Flask-RESTful-Swagger: Documented best practices for building RESTful APIs in Python

In modern applications, various APIs have become the core of the entire system. Therefore, how to design and build an efficient API is an issue that every developer must consider. Documentation of APIs is also one of the inevitable challenges for developers.

In the Python community, Flask can be said to be one of the very popular web frameworks. If you are using Flask to build a RESTful API, the Flask-RESTful-Swagger library can provide you with a good solution. In this article, we will introduce Flask-RESTful-Swagger, including its features and how to use it in your Flask application.

Flask-RESTful-Swagger: Introduction

Flask-RESTful-Swagger is a library for documenting the Flask-RESTful API. With it, you can easily add descriptions and comments to your API and automatically build documentation corresponding to the Swagger UI.

Swagger is a specification for API design, construction, documentation and consumption. It is used to describe API request and response messages and other related operation and parameter information. At the same time, Swagger also provides many practical tools, such as Swagger UI, which allows users to visually view and test APIs in the browser.

Flask-RESTful-Swagger: Features

• Simple and easy to use. Flask-RESTful-Swagger provides a relatively simple API to document your API.
• Integrate Swagger UI. Flask-RESTful-Swagger can automatically build documentation corresponding to the Swagger UI and embed it directly into your application for users to consume.
• Support formatting API. Flask-RESTful-Swagger supports defining API response formats, such as JSON, XML, etc., so that users can know the API response format.
• Provide hot tips. The Swagger UI of Flask-RESTful-Swagger provides a very useful hotspot prompt function, allowing users to quickly understand the API parameter requirements and response object structure.

Flask-RESTful-Swagger: How to use

Before you start using Flask-RESTful-Swagger, you need to install the Flask-RESTful and Flask-RESTful-Swagger libraries.

You can use the pip command to complete the installation:

pip install flask-restful
pip install flask-restful-swagger

First, we need to import the necessary modules:

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Api, Resource, reqparse
from flask_restful_swagger import swagger

Next, we need to instantiate the Flask application and API :

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app)

Then, we can define a resource class and use Flask-RESTful's decorator to describe the API, as follows:

class Hello(Resource):

    @swagger.operation(
        notes='获取问候语', 
        responseClass=str, 
        nickname='hello', 
        parameters=[],
        responseMessages=[
            {
                'code': 200,
                'message': '获取成功'
            },
            {
                'code': 500,
                'message': '服务器异常'
            }
        ]
    )
    def get(self):
        """
        获取问候语
        :return: 问候语
        """
        return 'Hello, World!'

In the above code, we use Swagger's decorator Container to describe the meta information of the API. Among them, @swagger.operation is a decorator used to describe API operations. We can use it to define the name, description, parameters, response and other information of the operation.

Next, we need to add the resource class to the API as follows:

api.add_resource(Hello, '/hello')

Finally, after starting the application, we can access it by accessing http://localhost:5000/api /doc to view API documentation and test API.

Flask-RESTful-Swagger: Summary

In this article, we introduced the Flask-RESTful-Swagger library and described its features and how to use it to document the Flask-RESTful API. As the best practice for documented RESTful APIs, Flask-RESTful-Swagger not only provides a simple and easy-to-use API, but also provides functions such as integrating Swagger UI, supporting formatted APIs, and providing hotspot tips. In short, using Flask-RESTful-Swagger to document the API of your Flask application will be a wise choice for you.

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