Now that we've introduced APIs and learned a bit about HTTP and REST, we will work on building an application (the recipe-sharing app known as Smilecook). In this chapter, we aim to kick-start the actual project development. This is a recipe-sharing platform in which users can create accounts and share their own recipes with other users. As you can imagine, it will contain a lot of API endpoints for our users so that they can manage their recipes. We will be using the Flask-RESTful package to efficiently develop our RESTful API.

This chapter will talk about the CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) of these recipes, as well as how to set the publish status of the recipe.

Flask-RESTful is a Flask extension that allows us to quickly develop RESTful APIs. Compared to the built-in wrapper, @app.route('/'), which we discussed in the previous chapter, Flask-RESTful allows us to maintain and structure the API endpoints in a much better and easier way.

In this chapter, we will develop our project using this Flask extension so that you will see how we can structure our endpoints.

Using Flask-RESTful to Develop Our Recipe-Sharing Platform, "Smilecook"

In this book, we are going to develop a recipe-sharing platform called Smilecook. Beginning with this chapter, we will start adding functions to it. We believe this approach will help you learn about the key concepts and skills you will need so that you can develop this application and help it reach its full potential, while at the same time helping you understand the entire development workflow.

First, we will build the basic CRUD functions of the recipes...

PyCharm will help us create a virtual environment. We want to develop our project in its own virtual environment in order to keep it isolated. Due to this, we will have absolute control over the versions of the packages that we are going to use.

The best way to learn is through practice. Let's get our hands dirty now!

Exercise 5: Creating a Development Project in PyCharm

Before you start developing the Python application, you'll need to create a development project in PyCharm. PyCharm manages things using projects. In this exercise, you will learn how to create a new development project in PyCharm called Smilecook. You will also need to install the necessary packages for this project. Let's get started:

1. Create the project and name it smilecook:
   

   Figure 2.2: Creating a project

2. Check the project structure and ensure that the virtual environment has been created. Once the module has been created, we will be able to see the project...

As you can imagine, a recipe may have several attributes. To save every detail of these attributes, we will model the recipe using a class. This recipe class is going to have several essential attributes.

Here is a brief description of the attributes that we will define in the recipe class:

• name: The name of the recipe.
• description: The description of the recipe.
• num_of_servings: The number of servings.
• cook_time: The cooking time required. This is an integer whose units are in seconds.
• directions: The directions.
• is_publish: The publish status of the recipe; the default is draft.

In the next exercise, we will show you how to code the recipe class so that it has these attributes.

Exercise 6: Creating the Recipe Model

In this exercise, we will code the recipe model, step by step. The recipe class will contain the attributes that we discussed previously. The code file for this exercise can be found in Lesson2/Exercise06...

Now that we have defined all our resources, we will set up some endpoints so that users can send requests to them. These endpoints can be accessed by the users and are connected to specific resources. We will be using the add_resource method on the API object to specify the URL for these endpoints and route the client HTTP request to our resources.

For example, the api.add_resource(RecipeListResource, '/recipes') syntax is used to link the route (relative URL path) to RecipeListResource so that HTTP requests will be directed to this resource. Depending on the HTTP verb (for example, GET, and POST), the request will be handled by the corresponding methods in the resource accordingly.

Exercise 10: Creating the Main Application File

In this exercise, we will create our app.py file, which will be our main application file. We will set up Flask and initialize our flask_restful.API there. Finally, we will set up the endpoints so that users can send...

Now, we are going to use the httpie and curl commands to test our API endpoints. We will test the functions for getting all the recipes back from the server and create/update/delete, publish, and unpublish the recipes. The best way to learn this is to complete a hands-on exercise. Let's get started!

Exercise 11: Testing the Endpoints Using curl and httpie

In this exercise, we are going to use the httpie and curl commands to send requests to the endpoints so that we can create our first recipe. We want you to get comfortable using the httpie and curl command-line testing tool. Let's get started:

1. Open the Terminal in PyCharm and type in the following commands. You can use either the httpie or curl command. The following is the httpie command (= is for string and := is for non-string):

   http POST localhost:5000/recipes name="Cheese Pizza" description="This is a lovely cheese pizza" num_of_servings...

In this chapter, we built the RESTful API using the Flask-RESTful package. By doing this, you have seen how simple and easy it is to perform such tasks. We are building our project in a structural manner, which allows us to easily extend the project in the subsequent chapters. In this chapter, we created the models and resources folder; we will be developing more models and resources later in this book. So far, our food recipe-sharing platform, Smilecook, is capable of performing CRUD, as well as setting the publish status of the recipe. We have also tested the application to make sure it is working properly. Finally, you started to realize the power of Postman, which greatly automates the whole testing process. In the next chapter, we will learn about how to perform data validation.