SIMPLE CRUD API WITH DJANGO REST FRAMEWORK

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

Requirements

Python 3.6
Django 3.1
Django REST Framework

Installation

After you cloned 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. Endpoints should be logically organized around collections and elements, both of which are resources.

In our case, we have one single resource, movies, so we will use the following URLS - /movies/ and /movies/ for collections and elements, respectively:

Endpoint	HTTP Method	CRUD Method	Result
`movies`	GET	READ	Get all movies
`movies/:id`	GET	READ	Get a single movie
`movies`	POST	CREATE	Create a new movie
`movies/:id`	PUT	UPDATE	Update a movie
`movies/:id`	DELETE	DELETE	Delete a movie

Use

We can test the API using curl or httpie, or we can use Postman

Httpie is a user-friendly http client that's written in Python. Let's try and install that.

You can install httpie using pip:

pip install httpie

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 if we try this:

http  http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/

we get:

{
    "detail": "Authentication credentials were not provided."
}

Instead, if we try to access with credentials:

http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/3 "Authorization: Bearer eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ0b2tlbl90eXBlIjoiYWNjZXNzIiwiZXhwIjoxNjE2MjA4Mjk1LCJqdGkiOiI4NGNhZmMzMmFiZDA0MDQ2YjZhMzFhZjJjMmRiNjUyYyIsInVzZXJfaWQiOjJ9.NJrs-sXnghAwcMsIWyCvE2RuGcQ3Hiu5p3vBmLkHSvM"

we get the movie with id = 3

{  "title":  "Avengers",  "genre":  "Superheroes",  "year":  2012,  "creator":  "admin"  }

Create users and Tokens

First we need to create a user, so we can log in

http POST http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/auth/register/ email="[email protected]" username="USERNAME" password1="PASSWORD" password2="PASSWORD"

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/api/v1/auth/token/ username="username" password="password"

after that, we get the token

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

We got two tokens, the access token will be used to authenticated all the requests we need to make, this access token will expire after some time. We can use the refresh token to request a need access token.

requesting new access token

http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/auth/token/refresh/ refresh="eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ0b2tlbl90eXBlIjoicmVmcmVzaCIsImV4cCI6MTYxNjI5MjMyMSwianRpIjoiNGNkODA3YTlkMmMxNDA2NWFhMzNhYzMxOTgyMzhkZTgiLCJ1c2VyX2lkIjozfQ.hP1wPOPvaPo2DYTC9M1AuOSogdRL_mGP30CHsbpf4zA"

and we will get a new access token

{
    "access": "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ0b2tlbl90eXBlIjoiYWNjZXNzIiwiZXhwIjoxNjE2MjA4Mjk1LCJqdGkiOiI4NGNhZmMzMmFiZDA0MDQ2YjZhMzFhZjJjMmRiNjUyYyIsInVzZXJfaWQiOjJ9.NJrs-sXnghAwcMsIWyCvE2RuGcQ3Hiu5p3vBmLkHSvM"
}

The API has some restrictions:

The movies are always associated with a creator (user who created it).
Only authenticated users may create and see movies.
Only the creator of a movie may update or delete it.
The API doesn't allow unauthenticated requests.

Commands

Get all movies
http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/ "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}" 
Get a single movie
http GET http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/{movie_id}/ "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}" 
Create a new movie
http POST http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/ "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}" title="Ant Man and The Wasp" genre="Action" year=2018 
Full update a movie
http PUT http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/{movie_id}/ "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}" title="AntMan and The Wasp" genre="Action" year=2018
Partial update a movie
http PATCH http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/{movie_id}/ "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}" title="AntMan and The Wasp" 
Delete a movie
http DELETE http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/{movie_id}/ "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"

Pagination

The API supports pagination, by default responses have a page_size=10 but if you want change that you can pass through params page_size={your_page_size_number}

http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/?page=1 "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"
http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/?page=3 "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"
http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/?page=3&page_size=15 "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"

Filters

The API supports filtering, you can filter by the attributes of a movie like this

http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/?title="AntMan" "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"
http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/?year=2020 "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"
http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/?year__gt=2019&year__lt=2022 "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"
http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/?genre="Action" "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"
http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/?creator__username="myUsername" "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"

You can also combine multiples filters like so

http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/?title="AntMan"&year=2020 "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"
http http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/movies/?year__gt=2019&year__lt=2022&genre="Action" "Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_TOKEN}"