Build a REST API with Falcon (Python)

in Blog on Falcon, Python

Synopsis

I hope this guide help guys who gonna start coding in Python and implementing REST API

Assumptions

I understand you have a clear idea about REST is and python installed onto your environment and you have a real os (not windows)

Motivation

  • Introducing into a new programming language to me: Python

  • Learning basic concepts and best practices in Python coding

Setting up the environment

In order to get and environment ready to start coding we’ll follow the below steps:

  • 1. Creating a project directory for this development

    mkdir -p /Users/Ivan/Sandbox/WesoviLabs/falcon-rest-api

cd /Users/Ivan/Sandbox/WesoviLabs/falcon-rest-api

  • 2. Setting up a Virtual environment

    We can skip next step in case of virtualenv is already installed.

    pip install virtualenv

    We could use the next virtualenvironment for ent developments

    virtualenv my-restapi-virtualenv

    We activate the virtualenv

    source my-restapi-virtualenv/bin/activate

  • 2. Installing required libraries

    The falcon librrary

    pip install falcon

    Gunicorn is a python WSGI server, more info here

    pip install gunicorn

    Cython will make our application fly!, PyPy would be even better but unfortunately Falcon is currently only compatible with PyPy 2.7

    pip install --upgrade cython falcon

Creating a very basic application

We will create the app.py. In order to run the application we can do it just by the below command

gunicorn app:api

Now we can open another temrinal and test the service by running

curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/books/ -i

Code

Code can be found on Github, click here to download it

In a few days I will be publishing a more detailed project developed with Falcon