How to Consume REST APIs with Django & Python Requests

A smart man once proclaimed that software is eating the world. Left in its wake is a slew of APIs. Thousands of them. APIs for making payments, sending texts, and even shipping packages. Even Chuck Norris has an API.

As a developer there’s a good chance you’ll need to interact with an API. And in the world of web, there’s an even better chance it will be a RESTful API. Therefore, knowing how to interact with these APIs is a key skill to have. Developing that skill is the focus of this blog post.

For the uninitiated, RESTful (REST for short) APIs are an architectural style that uses HTTP as the protocol, and its verbs (GET, POST) as the mechanisms to interact with the service. Roy Fielding's work is a great place to start if you want to learn more about REST.

Python developers have a great number of utilities available to them that make it easy to work with REST APIs. In addition, there are some features of Django, and packages created for the framework, that also make it easy to consume such services.

In this tutorial you will learn how to use Django, Django-Rest-Framework, and the Python requests package to consume data from an external REST API. The external API used is the awesome web service Embed.ly. Embed.ly provides and API that lets you submit a URL, and receive a response containing certain information about it, including a title, provider name, and if there’s media, a URL to it.

Our application is simple. It presents a user with a form whereby they can submit a URL. Once submitted, the backend Django application will accept the URL and submit a request to Embed.ly’s API. Embed.ly will then return a JSON response. That response will then be saved to the database and displayed on a page.

This tutorial assumes you have Python, PIP, and Virtualenv installed.

Create an Embedly Account

You will need an Embedly API key in order to complete this tutorial. Go to http://embed.ly and sign up for an account. Then access their API dashboard in order to locate your key.

1. Setup an Installation of Django

Open your terminal or command prompt. Navigate to a directory that you can use to complete the tutorial and execute the following commands.

If you're using a command prompt, just imagine the $ is a C:\

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 # make the directory $ mkdir restest # open directory $ cd restest # Mac: setup a virtual environment $ virtualenv venv -- no - site - packages # Mac users: activate the virtual environment $ source venv / bin / activate # Windows users: activate the virtual environment $ venv \ Scripts \ activate # install Django $ pip install Django == 1 . 7 . 1 # install Python requests $ pip install requests # install Django Rest Framework $ pip install djangorestframework # create the Django project $ django - admin startproject restembed . # open the project directory and create the Django app $ cd restembed $ django - admin startapp core # move back a directory $ cd ..

With those steps completed you should have a working version of Django installed. The next step is to open the settings.py file and make a few additions.

Open restembed/settings.py. Locate the INSTALLED_APPS value and update it as follows. Then add the TEMPLATE_DIRS value after that.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 INSTALLED_APPS = ( 'django.contrib.admin' , 'django.contrib.auth' , 'django.contrib.contenttypes' , 'django.contrib.sessions' , 'django.contrib.messages' , 'django.contrib.staticfiles' , 'restembed.core' , 'rest_framework' , ) # Template directory setting TEMPLATE_DIRS = ( os . path . join ( os . path . dirname ( __file__ ), 'templates' ), ) EMBEDLY_KEY = '<your key>'

Now we can create and commit the database migrations. Switch back to the command prompt or terminal. Make sure you're in the restembed directory.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 # commit the migrations $ python manage . py migrate Operations to perform : Synchronize unmigrated apps : rest_framework Apply all migrations : admin , contenttypes , auth , sessions Synchronizing apps without migrations : Creating tables ... Installing custom SQL ... Installing indexes ... Running migrations : Applying contenttypes . 0001 _initial ... OK Applying auth . 0001 _initial ... OK Applying admin . 0001 _initial ... OK Applying sessions . 0001 _initial ... OK # create a super user $ python manage . py createsuperuser Username ( leave blank to use 'tobias' ): Email address : Password : Password ( again ): Superuser created successfully .

2. Create Model

At the core of the application is a simple model. It is based on the data set returned from the Embed.ly web service.

Open restembed/core/models.py and update it as follows.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 from django.db import models class SavedEmbeds ( models . Model ): type = models . CharField ( max_length = 15 ) provider_url = models . URLField () provider_name = models . CharField ( max_length = 100 ) title = models . CharField ( max_length = 100 ) description = models . TextField () html = models . TextField () width = models . IntegerField () height = models . IntegerField () thumbnail_url = models . URLField () thumbnail_width = models . IntegerField () thumbnail_height = models . IntegerField () author_url = models . URLField () author_name = models . CharField ( max_length = 100 ) version = models . DecimalField ( max_digits = 4 , decimal_places = 2 )

With the model created, go back to your terminal to create and commit a migration.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 # create the migration $ python manage . py makemigrations Migrations for 'core' : 0001 _initial . py : - Create model SavedEmbeds # commit the migration $ python manage . py migrate Operations to perform : Synchronize unmigrated apps : rest_framework Apply all migrations : admin , core , contenttypes , auth , sessions Synchronizing apps without migrations : Creating tables ... Installing custom SQL ... Installing indexes ... Running migrations : Applying core . 0001 _initial ... OK

3. Create the DRF Serializer

With the model created we can now create a DRF Serializer. DRF defines serializers as follows:

"Serializers allow complex data such as querysets and model instances to be converted to native Python datatypes that can then be easily rendered into JSON, XML or other content types. Serializers also provide deserialization, allowing parsed data to be converted back into complex types, after first validating the incoming data."

So what is this serializer used for? If you recall, the application will make a GET request to the Embed.ly web service. Embed.ly will return a JSON response. We need to save that response to the database. There are a number of ways we could do this, however, DRF's serializers offer us a mechanism that can perform this action with minimal effort.

In the restembed/core/ directory create a file named serializer.py . Open it and add the following code. This will create a serializer based on the model created in the previous step.

1 2 3 4 5 6 from rest_framework import serializers from .models import SavedEmbeds class EmbedSerializer ( serializers . ModelSerializer ): class Meta : model = SavedEmbeds

The above code creates a serializer based on the project's main model.

4. Create the View

Now we can create the view that will process the incoming requests. Open restembed/core/views.py and add the following code.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 from django.shortcuts import render from django.conf import settings import requests from .forms import SubmitEmbed from .serializer import EmbedSerializer def save_embed ( request ): if request . method == "POST" : form = SubmitEmbed ( request . POST ) if form . is_valid (): url = form . cleaned_data [ 'url' ] r = requests . get ( 'http://api.embed.ly/1/oembed?key=' + settings . EMBEDLY_KEY + '&url=' + url ) json = r . json () serializer = EmbedSerializer ( data = json ) if serializer . is_valid (): embed = serializer . save () return render ( request , 'embeds.html' , { 'embed' : embed }) else : form = SubmitEmbed () return render ( request , 'index.html' , { 'form' : form })

At the start of the view, we checks to see if the request is a POST operation. If it is, we create an object using the URL form, passing in the data from request.POST. We then run the .is_valid() test on it. If the form is valid then we begin the process of fetching the JSON response and saving it to the database.

The first step in this process is to retrieve the submitted URL from the .cleaned_data[‘’] dict. The second step is to use Python Requests. Here we set the value of r to the response of requests.get(‘http://...’). This object has a method .json(), which when run it will show the output of the response in the JSON format. We set the json variable to that value. Now we can pass that variable to the serializer we created in the previous step.

Lastly, we run an if statement to check of the serializer .is_valid(). If it is we proceed to save the record to the database with emeb = serializer.save() . Once that is complete we return a template showing the embed page.

5. Create a Form

We’ll need a simple form to collect the URL for the end user. This form will have one field. That field will allow a user to enter a URL that they want saved to the database.

Open restembed/core/forms.py and add the following code.

1 2 3 4 from django import forms class SubmitEmbed ( forms . Form ): url = forms . URLField ()

6. Create the URLs

We'll need one additional URL configuration for this tutorial. This will allow users to open the root of the domain and see the form that will allow them to submit a URL.

Open restembed/urls.py and add the following line:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 from django.conf.urls import patterns , include , url from django.contrib import admin from core.views import save_embed urlpatterns = patterns ( '' , # Examples: # url(r'^$', 'core.views.home', name='home'), # url(r'^blog/', include('blog.urls')), url ( r'^admin/' , include ( admin . site . urls )), url ( r'^' , save_embed ), )

7. Create the Templates

We'll need three templates. Go to the restembed/ directory and create a folder there named templates .

Open the restembed/templates/ folder and create the following three template files.

Create templates/base.html

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 <html> <body> <div> {% block content %}{% endblock %} </div> </body> </html>

Create templates/index.html

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 {% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %} <form action= "/" method= "POST" > {% csrf_token %} {{ form }} <input type= "submit" value= "Save" /> </form> {% endblock %}

Create templates/embeds.html

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 {% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %} <ul> <li> {{ embed.title }} </li> <li> {{ embed.description }} </li> </ul> <img src= "{{ embed.thumbnail_url }}" /> {% endblock %}

8. Setup Admin

In order to ensure the code is working properly, you can activate the admin console to look at records. To do this, open restembed/core/admin.py and edit it as follows:

1 2 3 4 5 from django.contrib import admin from .models import SavedEmbeds admin . site . register ( SavedEmbeds )

9. Test the Application

The last step is to test the application. Follow the steps below to start the development server.

1 2 3 4 5 6 # make sure you're in the `restembed` directory $ pwd / .. ./ restest # start the development server $ python manage . py runserver

With the development server running open . In the form, enter a URL. YouTube or Vimeo URLs will probably work best.

Next, open up the admin page, login, and then open the Restembed page to see if the records are being created.