Building an API

In the previous chapter, you built a system for student registration and enrollment on courses. You created views to display course contents and learned how to use Django’s cache framework.

In this chapter, you will create a RESTful API for your e-learning platform. An API allows you to build a common core that can be used on multiple platforms like websites, mobile applications, plugins, and so on. For example, you can create an API to be consumed by a mobile application for your e-learning platform. If you provide an API to third parties, they will be able to consume information and operate with your application programmatically. An API allows developers to automate actions on your platform and integrate your service with other applications or online services. You will build a fully featured API for your e-learning platform.

In this chapter, you will:

• Install Django REST framework
• Create serializers for your models
• Build a RESTful...

Building a RESTful API

When building an API, there are several ways you can structure its endpoints and actions, but following REST principles is encouraged. The REST architecture comes from Representational State Transfer. RESTful APIs are resource-based; your models represent resources and HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE are used to retrieve, create, update, or delete objects. HTTP response codes are also used in this context. Different HTTP response codes are returned to indicate the result of the HTTP request, for example, 2XX response codes for success, 4XX for errors, and so on.

The most common formats to exchange data in RESTful APIs are JSON and XML. You will build a RESTful API with JSON serialization for your project. Your API will provide the following functionality:

• Retrieve subjects
• Retrieve available courses
• Retrieve course contents
• Enroll on a course

You can build an API from scratch with Django by creating custom...

Additional resources

The following resources provide additional information related to the topics covered in this chapter:

• Source code for this chapter – https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Django-4-by-example/tree/main/Chapter15
• REST framework website – https://www.django-rest-framework.org/
• REST framework settings – https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/settings/
• REST framework renderers – https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/renderers/
• REST framework parsers – https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/parsers/
• REST framework generic mixins and views – https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/generic-views/
• Download curl – https://curl.se/download.html
• Postman API platform – https://www.getpostman.com/
• REST framework serializers – https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/serializers/
• HTTP basic authentication –...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to use Django REST framework to build a RESTful API for your project. You created serializers and views for models, and you built custom API views. You also added authentication to your API and restricted access to API views using permissions. Next, you discovered how to create custom permissions, and you implemented ViewSets and routers. Finally, you used the Requests library to consume the API from an external Python script.

The next chapter will teach you how to build a chat server using Django Channels. You will implement asynchronous communication using WebSockets and you will use Redis to set up a channel layer.