Tech Talk
by Engineers of Acroquest Myanmar Technology
Easy development with FastAPI
Hello, this is Thin Pyai from Acroquest Myanmar Technology. Now, I am working as a technical architect.
This blog contents are based on FastAPI 0.78.0 version.
I am going to introduce a quick server development by using FastAPI. From my example, named “Book Store “, you can understand how it is easy to develop a server within a short time by using FastAPI and its useful libraries.
As the contents are much, I will introduce part by part. This blog will introduce you
- what FastAPI is and
- how to start using it.
FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints.
Here are its key features. This is the reason for selecting FastAPI in this example.
| 1 | Fast | Very high performance, on par with NodeJS and Go (thanks to Starlette and Pydantic). One of the fastest Python frameworks available. |
| 2 | Fast to code | Increase the speed to develop features by about 200% to 300%. * |
| 3 | Fewer bugs | Reduce about 40% of human (developer) induced errors. * |
| 4 | Intuitive | Great editor support. Completion everywhere. Less time debugging. |
| 5 | Easy | Designed to be easy to use and learn. Less time reading docs. |
| 6 | Short | Minimize code duplication. Multiple features from each parameter declaration. Fewer bugs. |
| 7 | Robust | Get production-ready code. With automatic interactive documentation. |
| 8 | Standards-based | Based on (and fully compatible with) the open standards for APIs: OpenAPI (previously known as Swagger) and JSON Schema. |
More information is at https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/
However, beginners may feel difficulties when we want to develop more than tutorial level because
1. Guideline community is very small. Its documentation and examples are very simple. It will be difficult to get good references when your requirement becomes high to meet with your project design and architecture.
2. FastAPI uses SQLAlchemy. If you follow their tutorials, your model will be full of dependencies of ORM. It will be difficult to separate your models from storage concerns.
But you can avoid it by understanding ORM.
In this series of blogs, I would like to show you how we can develop quickly. Additionally, I will introduce one of powerful but still in experimental state features in this content writing time.
Simply, this is the image of our system.
In this series of blogs, I am going to create a server with the following technologies.
- FastAPI : As I introduced above, it is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+. For details, please read https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/
- GraphQL: A query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. For details, please read https://graphql.org/
- SQLite: SQLite is a C-language library that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine. SQLite is the most used database engine in the world. For details, please read https://www.sqlite.org/index.html
FastAPI has effective libraries to work with those technologies.
| No | Library | Explanation |
| 1 | Strawberry | It is a new GraphQL library for Python 3. https://strawberry.rocks/ In future, it can work with Pydantic for efficient implementation techniques like reducing duplicate codes and validation check. It is still in experimental feature. It is still in experimental feature. But I will show some samples in today’s topic. Detail: https://strawberry.rocks/docs/integrations/pydantic |
| 2 | Pydantic | It is for data validation and settings management using python type annotations. Detail: https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/ |
| 3 | SQLAlchemy | Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper that gives application developers the full power and flexibility of SQL. Detail : https://www.sqlalchemy.org/ |
Additionally, as server workers,
| 4 | uvicorn | Uvicorn is an ASGI web server implementation for Python. And Uvicorn has a Gunicorn-compatible worker class. |
| 5 | gunicorn | Gunicorn ‘Green Unicorn’ is a Python WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. |
Using that combination, Gunicorn would act as a process manager, listening on the port and the IP. And it would transmit the communication to the worker processes running the Uvicorn class.
And then the Gunicorn-compatible Uvicorn worker class would be in charge of converting the data sent by Gunicorn to the ASGI standard for FastAPI to use it.
Detail : https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/deployment/server-workers/
Let’s try those things step by step.
Before implementing, I would like to recommend you read and understand the above contents.
- Setup environment (Python)
- Before starting the tutorial, you need to have Python version 3.6+.
- Install the necessary libraries
> pip install fastapi
> pip install uvicorn[standard] gunicorn
> pip install strawberry-graphql[fastapi]
> pip install sqlalchemy
- Let’s develop.
This tutorial is about book store.
Book can be registered. Registered books can be got. By using id, each book can be got/ deleted.
I will create the following 5 files.
| 1 | database.py | Database setting for connecting with database. |
| 2 | models.py | Model definition and table definition. |
| 3 | crud.py | CRUD operation definitions. |
| 4 | main.py | Main function and endpoint definitions. |
| 5 | type.py | Object types definition to input and output to server application. |
1) In main.py, define a simple query which will get a book.
Let’s check with sample data for initial understanding.
get_book() will accept id as input data. It will return a sample book data.
As get_book() is the GraphQL Endpoint, strawberry APIs are used.
In here, you will need to understand GraphQL query and how to use Strawberry library. Please read https://strawberry.rocks/docs/general/queries
import strawberry
@strawberry.type
class Query:
@strawberry.field
def get_book(self, id: int):
return {
'title': 'The End We Start From',
'author': 'Megan Hunter',
'type': 'fiction'
}
Strawberry provides support for FastAPI with a custom APIRouter called GraphQLRouter.
Define a route to access our endpoint.
https://strawberry.rocks/docs/integrations/fastapi
from fastapi import FastAPI
import strawberry
from strawberry.fastapi import GraphQLRouter
@strawberry.type
class Query:
@strawberry.field
def get_book(self, id: int):
return {
'title': 'The End We Start From',
'author': 'Megan Hunter',
'type': 'fiction'
}
schema = strawberry.Schema(query=Query)
graphql_app = GraphQLRouter(
schema
)
app = FastAPI()
app.include_router(graphql_app, prefix="/graphql")
Define main method to run the server with host 127.0.0.1 and 8000 port.
I setup None for log setting in current. For log configuration, please read detail at https://www.uvicorn.org/settings/#logging
from fastapi import FastAPI
import strawberry
from strawberry.fastapi import GraphQLRouter
import uvicorn
@strawberry.type
class Query:
@strawberry.field
def get_book(self, id: int):
return {
'title': 'The End We Start From',
'author': 'Megan Hunter',
'type': 'fiction'
}
schema = strawberry.Schema(query=Query)
graphql_app = GraphQLRouter(
schema
)
app = FastAPI()
app.include_router(graphql_app, prefix="/graphql")
if __name__ == '__main__':
uvicorn.run(app=app, host='127.0.0.1', port='8000', log_config=None)
2) Run the server
activate the virtual environment.
> .venv\Scripts\activate
run python file.
> python -m main
3) Access to GraphQL console
by going to http://127.0.0.1:8000/graphql from browser
4) Paste and execute following query which will call get_book().
{
getBook{
title
author
type
}
}
Following result must be returned.
{
"data": {
"getBook": {
"title": "The End We Start From",
"author": "Megan Hunter",
"type": "fiction"
}
}
}
In this blog, I introduced how to develop a server easily in short time with FastAPI.
As I described only how to access a GraphQL Endpoint, I will introduce how to interact with Database for CRUD activities in the future blog. Please look forward.
Thank you very much for reading until the end.
Stay safe everyone.
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Senior Software Developer: https://www.acromyanmar.com/senior-software-developer/
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