teaching-basic-flask-api

A simple one file API example using Python and Flask

Getting your environment setup

Assuming Windows with these commands. Mac and Linux will be slightly different.

• Clone this project with git clone https://github.com/teaching-basic-flask-api
• Move into the root of the project
• Create a virtual environment python -m venv venv_basic_flask
• Activate your new virtual environment . venv_basic_flask/Scripts/Activate
• Install flask pip install flask

Starting the API

• In the root of the project run flask --app api run --debug
  • This will start the API running on localhost and port 5000
  • Note: the --debug flag will cause the flask server to reload each time a change is made to the api.py file, which is nice if you want to experiment and make changes
• You can stop the API at any time with ctrl + c

cURL commands

Once the API is running on the flask server, you can interact with it using cURL.

• Home
  • curl localhost:5000
• Get static users
  • curl localhost:5000
• Get users
  • curl localhost:5000/users
• Create a new user
  • curl -X POST localhost:5000/users/create -d '{"username": "your-username", "favorite_color": "your-favorite-color", "email": "your-email"}'