restit

A simple example of how to use forms to pull data from a RESTful api into a django project. In this case, we are pulling data from the Destiny 2 api. For this to work you need an api key from Destiny2, which is assumed to be in your environment variables (see 'Secret Stuff' discussion below).

Tested locally on Ubuntu 16.04/Python 3.6, and remotely at Heroku. For a working deployment, see:
http://restit.herokuapp.com

To do

1. Build version with something more realistic/complex that changes daily (SVM).
2. Improve status message formatting. I followed this for the basics:
   https://simpleisbetterthancomplex.com/tips/2016/09/06/django-tip-14-messages-framework.html
3. Not sure why field label is showing up for user submit form: https://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/7fakjq/using_bootstrap3_i_want_no_label_on_form_element/

Notes

1. Secret stuff

The Django SECRET_KEY and the Destiny 2 api-key (D2_KEY) need to be kept secret. As is common practice, and recommended in Two Scoops of Django (Section 5.3), for restit we are storing the secrets as environment variables. To set them locally (in Linux) just use:

export SECRET_KEY=*secret key value*    
export D2_KEY=*your d2 api key value*

If you are using conda distribution of Python (which I am), things are a bit different:
https://conda.io/docs/user-guide/tasks/manage-environments.html#saving-environment-variables
For conda, in the virtual environment named r_est, I did the following:

cd ~/anaconda3/envs/r_env    
mkdir -p ./etc/conda/activate.d    
mkdir -p ./etc/conda/deactivate.d    
touch ./etc/conda/activate.d/env_vars.sh    
touch ./etc/conda/deactivate.d/env_vars.sh     

Then in ./etc/conda/activate.d/env_vars.sh:

#!/bin/sh
export SECRET_KEY=*secret key value*    
export D2_KEY=*your d2 api key value*

Obviously, replace the placeholders with strings containing your actual keys. Next, in ./etc/conda/activate.d/env_vars.sh:

#!/bin/sh
unset SECRET_KEY
unset D2_KEY    

Then when you activate the virtual environment, the relevant variables will be seen in conda, and when you deactivate it, they will be erased.

The D2_KEY is pulled in restit/settings.py with the helper function get_env_variable, and can be imported elsewhere in the project with from django.conf import settings and then accessed with settings.D2_KEY. You can see this in /d2_api/utils.py

On Heroku things are much simpler:

heroku config:set SECRET_KEY=*secret key value*
heroku config:set D2_KEY=*your d2 api key value*    

And things should just work.

2. Saving versus updating the db

In a full-fledged project, you will want to update, not just add, new rows. The docs say:

Every ModelForm also has a save() method. This method creates and saves a database object from the data bound to the form. A subclass of ModelForm can accept an existing model instance as the keyword argument instance; if this is supplied, save() will update that instance. If it’s not supplied, save() will create a new instance of the specified model

Acknowledgments

Initial version of restit was based on https://ultimatedjango.com/blog/how-to-consume-rest-apis-with-django-python-reques/.