Build REST API using DRF

Hi there,

Thanks for reading my article. This is my first article in the medium. Here I am going to describe each and everything about building REST API using the Django REST Framework. It will be a full CRUD operation using only one view class and one serializer class. Let’s do it together. First of all, we need to install the Django rest framework on our computer. Open the terminal/cmd, type the following command, and then hit enter

pip install djangorestframework

Now create a project named djangoCore and an app named myApp using the following command.

django-admin startproject djangoCore
cd djangoCore
python manage.py startapp myApp

Add myApp and rest-framework in djangoCore/settings.py like following coding snippets.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
..................
    'rest_framework'
    'myApp'
..................
]

Create a model in myApp/models.py , we are assuming a model like below.

class StudentRecord(models.Model):
    name=models.CharField(max_length=200)
    student_id=models.CharField(max_length=100)
    department=models.CharField(max_length=100)
    completed_credit=models.IntegerField()
    blood_group=models.CharField(max_length=10)
    phone_number=models.CharField(max_length=20)

Now migrate the model using the following command.

python manage.py makemigrations myApp
python manage.py migrate

Our project is ready to create API endpoints. Create a file named serializers.py in the myApp directory and add the following coding snippets to serialize the data to reproduce the JSON object/array.

from rest_framework.serializers import ModelSerializer
from myApp.models import StudentRecord

class StudentSerializers(ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = StudentRecord
        fields = '__all__'

We have only the last two-step to get our result. Go to the myApp/views.py and create a class-based view which will inherit ModelViewSet. Suppose our view class is like below.

from rest_framework.viewsets import ModelViewSet
from myApp.models import StudentRecord
from myApp.serializers import StudentSerializers

class StudentView(ModelViewSet):
    serializer_class = StudentSerializers
    queryset = StudentRecord.objects.all()

Now create myApp/urls.py and create an object of DefaultRouter(). Then register the URL for the created view. So codebase of our myApp/urls.py will be

from django.urls import path, include
from rest_framework.routers import DefaultRouter

from myApp.views import StudentView

router = DefaultRouter()
router.register('student', StudentView, basename='student')
urlpatterns = [
    path('', include(router.urls))
]

DefaultRouter() includes routes for a set of list, create, update, retrieve, destroy actions. So we don’t need to implement every API endpoints in a separate view function/class.

We can also impose permission and authentication in all endpoints at the same time or in separate endpoints. But in this article, we don’t cover them up. Next, we will explore Mixins for separate actions of APIs. Thanks for reading the article.