Django REST Framework Tutorial¶
This is the second portion of ChatterBot’s Django tutorial. These tutorial are intended to briefly introduce beginners to the basics of Django, Django REST Framework, and other related libraries that provide a powerful foundation of knowledge for developing Python applications. For a more comprehensive tutorial, the official documentation for Django REST Framework is highly recommended.
In this section, we will be adding a REST API to our Django project from the previous tutorial.
1. Install Django REST Framework¶
Begin by installing Django REST Framework with the following command:
pip install djangorestframework
2. Configure Django REST Framework settings¶
Next, add rest_framework to your INSTALLED_APPS in the settings.py file of your Django project.
INSTALLED_APPS = (
# ...
'rest_framework',
)
Finish configuring Django REST Framework for your project by adding the following lines to your settings.py file.
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': [
'rest_framework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
],
'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': [
'rest_framework.permissions.IsAuthenticated',
],
'DEFAULT_PAGINATION_CLASS': 'rest_framework.pagination.PageNumberPagination',
'PAGE_SIZE': 10
}
3. Create a Serializer¶
A serializer is a class that defines the fields that get converted to JSON. Create a new file called serializers.py in the chapters directory.
from rest_framework import serializers
from chapters.models import Chapter
class ChapterSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
class Meta:
model = Chapter
fields = (
'title',
'number',
)
4. Create a ViewSet¶
A viewset is a class that provides the actions that can be performed on a resource. Create a new file called viewsets.py in the chapters directory.
from rest_framework import viewsets
from chapters.models import Chapter
from chapters.serializers import ChapterSerializer
class ChapterViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
queryset = Chapter.objects.all()
serializer_class = ChapterSerializer
5. Add a Router¶
A router is a class that automatically determines the URL conf for a set of views. You can add your router to your project’s existing urls.py file.
from django.urls import include
from rest_framework.routers import DefaultRouter
from chapters.viewsets import ChapterViewSet
router = DefaultRouter()
router.register(r'chapters', ChapterViewSet)
urlpatterns = [
# ...
path('api/', include(router.urls)),
]
6. Test Your API¶
To test your API, open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8000/api/chapters/. You should see a JSON response with the chapters in your database.
{
"count": 1,
"next": null,
"previous": null,
"results": [
{
"title": "Introduction",
"number": 1
}
]
}
7. Conclusion¶
This concludes this mini tutorial on Django REST Framework. Now you know how to:
Add a REST API to your Django project
Create a serializer using Django REST Framework
Create a viewset and router to expose your API
For further learning, a good place to start would be how to use JavaScript to interact with your API from your webpages.
Up next in this series we’ll be continuing to build off of this project by adding filtering capabilities to our API using the django-filter package.
