Awesome web-browseable Web APIs.
Note: Full documentation for the project is available at http://django-rest-framework.org.
Django REST framework is a powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.
Some reasons you might want to use REST framework:
- The Web browseable API is a huge useability win for your developers.
- Authentication policies including OAuth1a and OAuth2 out of the box.
- Serialization that supports both ORM and non-ORM data sources.
- Customizable all the way down - just use regular function-based views if you don't need the more powerful features.
- Extensive documentation, and great community support.
There is a live example API for testing purposes, available here.
Below: Screenshot from the browseable API
- Python (2.6.5+, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3)
- Django (1.3, 1.4, 1.5)
Install using pip...
pip install djangorestframework
Add 'rest_framework' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
'rest_framework',
)
Let's take a look at a quick example of using REST framework to build a simple model-backed API for accessing users and groups.
Here's our project's root urls.py module:
from django.conf.urls.defaults import url, patterns, include
from django.contrib.auth.models import User, Group
from rest_framework import viewsets, routers
# ViewSets define the view behavior.
class UserViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
model = User
class GroupViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
model = Group
# Routers provide an easy way of automatically determining the URL conf
router = routers.DefaultRouter()
router.register(r'users', UserViewSet)
router.register(r'groups', GroupViewSet)
# Wire up our API using automatic URL routing.
# Additionally, we include login URLs for the browseable API.
urlpatterns = patterns('',
url(r'^', include(router.urls)),
url(r'^api-auth/', include('rest_framework.urls', namespace='rest_framework'))
)
We'd also like to configure a couple of settings for our API.
Add the following to your settings.py module:
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
# Use hyperlinked styles by default.
# Only used if the `serializer_class` attribute is not set on a view.
'DEFAULT_MODEL_SERIALIZER_CLASS':
'rest_framework.serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer',
# Use Django's standard `django.contrib.auth` permissions,
# or allow read-only access for unauthenticated users.
'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': [
'rest_framework.permissions.DjangoModelPermissionsOrAnonReadOnly'
]
}
Don't forget to make sure you've also added rest_framework to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
That's it, we're done!
Full documentation for the project is available at http://django-rest-framework.org.
For questions and support, use the REST framework discussion group, or #restframework on freenode IRC.
You may also want to follow the author on Twitter.
Copyright (c) 2011-2013, Tom Christie All rights reserved.
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