Building and deploying a Python API

About

In this session we will build some API endpoints, documentation for those endpoints, and the ability to test on a live site deploying on render.com. This is a simple example to get started, but hopefully it will provide the foundation for you all to build more complex APIs in the future. If you have any questions, I recommend leaving them in the YouTube comments.

Setup

1. Fork the repository:
   Click on the 'Fork' button at the top right corner of the repository's GitHub page. This will create a copy of the repository in your own GitHub account.

2. Clone your forked repository: Make sure to replace YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME with your username in this command

   git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/python-api-example.git
   

3. Navigate to directory

   cd python-api-example

4. Install Python libraries

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

5. Run Flask Endpoint

   python3 app.py

6. Navigate to server
   Open up URL app is running on (should say when you run above command -- http://127.0.0.1:5000 for example). Navigate to http://127.0.0.1:5000/apidocs to see Swagger endpoint specs.

7. Making changes and pushing to your fork
   After making your changes, you can push them to your forked GitHub repository.

   git add -u
   git commit -m "Your commit message"
   git push origin lunch-and-learn

Render.com

We will be using render.com to deploy our app. Create an account there and connect your Github using the following instructions

Airtable

As a very simple and easy to set-up DB, we will be using airtable. I'll show in the live stream how to create an API token to use in Python API requests.