Setting up a RESTful Flask API

In our app, we will create a RESTful interface to the blog post data in our database. The representations of the data will be sent as JSON. The data will be retrieved and modified using the general form in the preceding table, but the URI will be /api/posts.

We could just use the standard Flask views to create the API, but the Flask extension Flask Restful makes the task much easier.

To install Flask Restful:

$ pip install Flask-Restful

In the extensions.py file, initialize the Api object that will handle all the routes:

from flask.ext.restful import Api
…
rest_api = Api()

The control logic and views for our Post API should be stored in a new folder named rest in the controllers folder. In this folder, we will need an empty __init__.py and a file named post.py. Inside post.py, let's create a simpleHello World example:

from flask.ext.restful import Resource

class PostApi(Resource):
    def get(self):
        return {'hello': 'world'}

In Flask Restful, every REST...