Flask Restful: Project Structure

There are many different ways to organize your Flask-RESTful app, but here we’ll describe one that scales pretty well with larger apps and maintains a nice level organization.

The basic idea is to split your app into three main parts: the routes, the resources, and any common infrastructure.

Here’s an example directory structure:

myapi/
    __init__.py
    app.py          # this file contains your app and routes
    resources/
        __init__.py
        foo.py      # contains logic for /Foo
        bar.py      # contains logic for /Bar
    common/
        __init__.py
        util.py     # just some common infrastructure

The common directory would probably just contain a set of helper functions to fulfill common needs across your application. It could also contain, for example, any custom input/output types your resources need to get the job done.

In the resource files, you just have your resource objects. So here’s what foo.py might look like:

from flask_restful import Resource

class Foo(Resource):
    def get(self):
        pass
    def post(self):
        pass

The key to this setup lies in app.py:

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Api
from myapi.resources.foo import Foo
from myapi.resources.bar import Bar
from myapi.resources.baz import Baz

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

api.add_resource(Foo, '/Foo', '/Foo/<string:id>')
api.add_resource(Bar, '/Bar', '/Bar/<string:id>')
api.add_resource(Baz, '/Baz', '/Baz/<string:id>')

Python REST APIs With Flask, Connexion, and SQLAlchemy

The goal of this article is to show you how to use Python 3, Flask, and Connexion to build useful REST APIs that can include input and output validation, and provide Swagger documentation as a bonus. Also included is a simple but useful single page web application that demonstrates using the API with JavaScript and updating the DOM with it.

The REST API you’ll be building will serve a simple people data structure where the people are keyed to the last name, and any updates are marked with a new timestamp.

This data could be represented in a database, saved in a file, or be accessible through some network protocol, but for us an in-memory data structure works fine. One of the purposes of an API is to decouple the data from the application that uses it, hiding the data implementation details.

API Creation: Full Stack Python

Creating and exposing APIs allows your web application to interact with other applications through machine-to-machine communication.

API creation frameworks