Django Rest Framework – e-lo [IT Engineer life]

https://www.django-rest-framework.org/community/tutorials-and-resources/

This tutorial was used for 50%, the rest is my own demo:

https://tests4geeks.com/django-rest-framework-tutorial/

Set up django:

mkvirtualenv dapi
navigate to your folder, then mkdir dapi
cd dapi, setprojectdir .
pip install django
django-admin startproject api_apps

Then you get the folder structure, run it:

python manage.py runserver
Go to http://localhost:8000/

The install worked successfully! Congratulations!

Then run the command:

python manage.py migrate

Then we can start to create an app

python manage.py startapp demo

Now we have default project for django

Lets make some models, the Bag and Item class, and also add the apps to settings.py “demo.apps.DemoConfig”, then run:

python manage.py makemigrations demo

If that has no errors then apply the migration.

python manage.py migrate

python manage.py runserver

We now need to register the models within django:

Run

python manage.py makemigrations demo
python manage.py migrate

Now we need to add a superuser to do CRUD operations.

python manage.py createsuperuser
python manage.py makemigrations demo
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver
Go to http://localhost:8000/ admin

(I changed the class model to include __str__ method, view picture)

Now we can add a bag and items:

Now we can install REST:

pip install djangorestframework
add to INSTALLED_APPS the line: “rest_framework”

To perform HTTP-based interaction we have to define rules to convert Django models (python objects) to the json strings and vice versa. This is a serialization/deserialization task. So, let’s define some model-based serializers:

from rest_framework import serializers
from .models import Bag, Item

class BagSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = Bag
fields = ‘__all__’

class ItemSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = Item
fields = ‘__all__’

A viewset is a set of views (controllers in traditional MVC terminology). If you take a look at the ModelViewSet code you’ll see that there’s a lot of functionality automatically added there. You are able to create, view, edit and delete objects in your system (and database). It’s a full CRUD set with http as the interface protocol. Let’s configure two viewsets for our classes:

Now we need to add the view to urls.py, so add the file urls.py to api_apps\demo\urls.py (create this), then change the api_apps\urls.py and add the code fields = ‘__all__’ to both serializer classes if it is not there, it will give an error for version lower then xxx.

python manage.py runserver
visit http://localhost:8000/admin/
visit http://localhost:8000/api/

Now we can view the Nike bag and the caps item we added before from api

Here is the bag from the api, there is also a possibility to post data (the same goes for item):

Now lets post some new items to the bag:

Great, now lets get it in json format, use the get button or url:

http://localhost:8000/api/item/?format=json

So to wrap this up.

We install django and rest
Then we make a model
To perform HTTP-based interaction we have to define rules to convert Django models (python objects) to the json strings and vice versa. This is a serialization/deserialization task.
The view uses the model and serializer to present the data
We define the urls in our app
We share the app urls with the project / outer world if you will, so we get to them by HTTP.
We also tell the project what apps is available
Then we vist the web to get our data

To not get an 404 if you browse http://localhost:8000/ , then add the code to project\urls.py

urlpatterns = [
path(”, admin.site.urls),
path(‘admin/’, admin.site.urls),
path(‘api/’, include(“demo.urls”)),
]

Then you get to the admin page….