Flask-RESTAlchemy’s!

A Flask extension to build REST APIs based on SQLAlchemy models. Exported models expose all their properties by default, making the definition of Schema classes optional.

Installation

Install Flask-RESTAlchemy with pip:

pip install flask-restalchemy

or conda (package available on conda-forge):

conda install flask-restalchemy -c conda-forge

Minimal App

Let’s define a very simple SQLAlchemy model using flask-sqlalchemy:

from flask_sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
from sqlalchemy import Column, String, Integer

db = SQLAlchemy()


class Hero(db.Model):
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column(String)
    secret_name = Column(String)

Expose SQLAlchemy models in a very simple way is one of the aims of Flask-RESTAlchemy. Just instantiate an Api object and use Api.add_model to expose a model through an endpoint:

from flask import Flask
from flask_restalchemy import Api

app = Flask("tour-of-heroes")


@app.route("/create_db", methods=["POST"])
def create_db():
    db.create_all()
    return "DB created"


# Set an SQLite in-memory database
app.config["SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI"] = "sqlite:///:memory:"
db.init_app(app)  # Must be called before Api object creation

api = Api(app)
api.add_model(Hero, "/heroes")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

Api.add_model creates methods GET and POST for the Heroes collection at /heroes and methods GET, PUT and DELETE for /heroes/:id Let’s see it in action:

$ python app.py
 * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)

$ curl -X POST http://localhost:5000/create_db
DB Created

$ curl -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d "{\"name\":\"Mr. Nice\"}" http://localhost:5000/heroes
$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/heroes/1
{
    "id": 1,
    "name": "Mr. Nice",
    secret_name: "",
}

Serializers could be used to override the default serialization of models:

class HeroSerializer(ModelSerializer):

    secret_name = Field(load_only=True)


api = Api(app)
api.add_model(Hero, "/heroes", serializer_class=HeroSerializer)

In the above example, secret_name property will not be exposed on a GET, but can be updated in a PUT or POST.

Documentation