Getting Started With Django Rest Framework

In my adventure to learn django, I want to be able to setup REST api's to feed into dynamic front end sites. Potentially sites running react under the hood.

Install

To get started lets open up a todo app that I created with django-admin startproject todo.

        
pip install djangorestframework

Install APP

Now we need to declare rest_framwork as an INSTALLED_APP.

        
INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "rest_framework",
    ...
]

create the api app

Next I will create all the files that I need to get the api running.

        
mkdir api
touch api/__init__.py api/serializers.py api/urls.py api/views.py

base/models.py

I already have the following model from last time I was playing with django. It will suffice as it is not the focus of what I am learning for now.

Note the name of the model class is singular, this is becuase django will automatically pluralize it in places like the admin panel, and you would end up with Itemss.

        
from django.db import models

# Create your models here.

class Item(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

    def __str__(self):
        return f"{self.priority} {self.name}"

Next I will make some dummy data to be able to return. I popped open ipython and made a few records.

        
from base.models import Item

Item.objects.create(name='first')
Item.objects.create(name='second')
Item.objects.create(name='third')

api/serializers.py

Next we need to set up a serializer to seriaze and de-serialize data between our model and json. You can specify each field individually or all of them by passing in __all__.

        
from rest_framework import serializers

from base.models import Item


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

api/views.py

Now we need a view leveraging the djangorestframework. The serializer we just created will be used to serialize all of the rows into a list of objects that Response can handle.

Note: to return a collection of model objects we need to set many to True

        
from rest_framework.decorators import api_view
from rest_framework.response import Response

from base.models import Item

from .serializers import ItemSerializer


@api_view(["GET"])
def get_data(request):
    items = Item.objects.all()
    serializer = ItemSerializer(items, many=True)
    return Response(serializer.data)

@api_view(['POST'])
def add_item(request):
    serializer = ItemSerializer(data = request.data)
    if serializer.is_valid():
        serializer.save()
    return Response()

api/urls.py

Now we need to setup routing to access the views through an url.

        
from django.urls import path

from . import views

urlpatterns = [
        path('', views.get_data),
        path('add/', views.add_item),
        ]

todo/urls.py

Then we need to include these urls from our api in the urls specified by settings.ROOT_URLCONf

        
from django.urls import path

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path("api/", include("api.urls")),
]

Run it

        
python manage.py runserver

Running the developement server and going to localhost:8000/api we can see the full list of items in th api.