Category: Python

Python

JWT Authentication with Python and Flask

Post author By masnun
Post date May 12, 2017

In our blog post about HTTP Authentication, we promised we would next cover JSON Web Tokens aka JWT based authentication. So we wrote a detailed blog post on The Concepts of JWT explaining how the technology works behind the scene. And in this blog post, we would see how we can actually implement it in our REST API. In case you have missed them, we have also explained the basics of REST APIs along with a Python / Flask tutorial walking through some of the best practices.

PyJWT or a Flask Extension?

In our last blog post on JWT, we saw code examples based on the PyJWT library. A quick Google search also revealed a couple of Flask specific libraries. What do we use?

We can implement the functionality with PyJWT alright. It will allow us fine grained control. We would be able to customize every aspect of how the authentication process works. On the other hand, if we use Flask extensions, we would need to do less since these libraries or extensions already provide some sort of integrations with Flask itself. Also personally, I tend to choose my framework specific libraries for a task. They reduce the amount of task required to get things going.

In this blog post, we would be using the Flask-JWT package.

Getting Started

Before we can begin, we have to install the package using pip.

pip install Flask-JWT

1	pip install Flask-JWT

We also need an API end point that we want to secure. We can refer to the initial code we wrote for our HTTP Auth tutorial.

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")


class PrivateResource(Resource):
    def get(self):
        return {"meaning_of_life": 42}


api.add_resource(PrivateResource, '/private')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

from flask import Flask

from flask_restful import Resource, Api

app = Flask(__name__)

api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

class PrivateResource(Resource):

def get(self):

return {"meaning_of_life": 42}

api.add_resource(PrivateResource, '/private')

if __name__ == '__main__':

app.run(debug=True)

Now we work on securing it 🙂

Flask JWT Conventions

Flask JWT has the following convention:

There needs to be two functions – one for authenticating the user, this would be quite similar to the verify function we wrote in our last tutorial (http auth tutorial). The second function’s job is to identify user from a token. Let’s call this function identity.
The authentication function must return an object instance that has an attribute named id.
To secure an endpoint, we use the @jwt_required decorator.
An API endpoint is setup at /auth that accepts username and password via JSON payload and returns access_token which is the JSON Web Token we can use.
We must pass the token as part of the Authorization header, like – JWT <token>.

Authentication and Identity

First let’s write the function that will authenticate the user. The function will take in username and password and return an object instance that has the id attribute. In general, we would use database and the id would be user id. But for this example, we would just create an object with an ID of our choice.

USER_DATA = {
    "masnun": "abc123"
}


class User(object):
    def __init__(self, id):
        self.id = id

    def __str__(self):
        return "User(id='%s')" % self.id


def verify(username, password):
    if not (username and password):
        return False
    if USER_DATA.get(username) == password:
        return User(id=123)

USER_DATA = {

"masnun": "abc123"

}

class User(object):

def __init__(self, id):

self.id = id

def __str__(self):

return "User(id='%s')" % self.id

def verify(username, password):

if not (username and password):

return False

if USER_DATA.get(username) == password:

return User(id=123)

We are storing the user details in a dictionary like before. We have created User class with id attribute so we can fulfil the requirement of having id attribute. In our verify function, we compare the username and password and if it matches, we return an User instance with the id being 123. We will use this function to verify user logins.

Next we need the identity function that will give us user details for a logged in user.

def identity(payload):
    user_id = payload['identity']
    return {"user_id": user_id}

def identity(payload):

user_id = payload['identity']

return {"user_id": user_id}

The identity function will receive the decoded JWT. An example would be like:

{'exp': 1494589408, 'iat': 1494589108, 'nbf': 1494589108, 'identity': 123}

1	{'exp': 1494589408, 'iat': 1494589108, 'nbf': 1494589108, 'identity': 123}

Note the identity key in the dictionary. It’s the value we set in the id attribute of the object returned from the verify function. We should load the user details based on this value. But since we are not using the database, we are just constructing a simple dictionary with the user id.

Securing Endpoint

Now that we have a function to authenticate and another function to identify the user, we can start integrating Flask JWT with our REST API. First the imports:

from flask_jwt import JWT, jwt_required

1	from flask_jwt import JWT, jwt_required

Then we construct the jwt instance:

jwt = JWT(app, verify, identity)

1	jwt = JWT(app, verify, identity)

We pass the flask app instance, the authentication function and the identity function to the JWT class.

Then in the resource, we use the @jwt_required decorator to enforce authentication.

class PrivateResource(Resource):
    @jwt_required()
    def get(self):
        return {"meaning_of_life": 42}

class PrivateResource(Resource):

@jwt_required()

def get(self):

return {"meaning_of_life": 42}

Please note the jwt_required decorator takes a parameter (realm) which has a default value of None. Since it takes the parameter, we must use the parentheses to call the function first – @jwt_required() and not just @jwt_required. If this doesn’t make sense right away, don’t worry, please do some study on how decorators work in Python and it will come to you 🙂

Here’s the full code:

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api
from flask_jwt import JWT, jwt_required

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['SECRET_KEY'] = 'super-secret'

api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

USER_DATA = {
    "masnun": "abc123"
}


class User(object):
    def __init__(self, id):
        self.id = id

    def __str__(self):
        return "User(id='%s')" % self.id


def verify(username, password):
    if not (username and password):
        return False
    if USER_DATA.get(username) == password:
        return User(id=123)


def identity(payload):
    user_id = payload['identity']
    return {"user_id": user_id}


jwt = JWT(app, verify, identity)


class PrivateResource(Resource):
    @jwt_required()
    def get(self):
        return {"meaning_of_life": 42}


api.add_resource(PrivateResource, '/private')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

from flask import Flask

from flask_restful import Resource, Api

from flask_jwt import JWT, jwt_required

app = Flask(__name__)

app.config['SECRET_KEY'] = 'super-secret'

api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

USER_DATA = {

"masnun": "abc123"

}

class User(object):

def __init__(self, id):

self.id = id

def __str__(self):

return "User(id='%s')" % self.id

def verify(username, password):

if not (username and password):

return False

if USER_DATA.get(username) == password:

return User(id=123)

def identity(payload):

user_id = payload['identity']

return {"user_id": user_id}

jwt = JWT(app, verify, identity)

class PrivateResource(Resource):

@jwt_required()

def get(self):

return {"meaning_of_life": 42}

api.add_resource(PrivateResource, '/private')

if __name__ == '__main__':

app.run(debug=True)

Looks good? Let’s try it out.

Trying it out

Run the app and try to access the secured resource:

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private
{
  "description": "Request does not contain an access token",
  "error": "Authorization Required",
  "status_code": 401
}

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private

{

"description": "Request does not contain an access token",

"error": "Authorization Required",

"status_code": 401

}

Makes sense. The endpoint now requires authorization token. But we don’t have one, yet!

Let’s get one – we must send a POST request to /auth with a JSON payload containing username and password. Please note, the api prefix is not used, that is the url for the auth end point is not /api/v1/auth. But it is just /auth.

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"username":"masnun","password":"abc123"}' http://localhost:5000/auth
{
  "access_token": "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJleHAiOjE0OTQ1OTE4MjcsImlhdCI6MTQ5NDU5MTUyNywibmJmIjoxNDk0NTkxNTI3LCJpZGVudGl0eSI6MTIzfQ.q0p02opL0OxL7EGD7wiLbXbdfP8xQ7rXf7-3Iggqdi4"
}

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"username":"masnun","password":"abc123"}' http://localhost:5000/auth

{

"access_token": "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJleHAiOjE0OTQ1OTE4MjcsImlhdCI6MTQ5NDU5MTUyNywibmJmIjoxNDk0NTkxNTI3LCJpZGVudGl0eSI6MTIzfQ.q0p02opL0OxL7EGD7wiLbXbdfP8xQ7rXf7-3Iggqdi4"

}

Cool, we got the token. Now let’s use it to access the resource.

curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private -H "Authorization: JWT eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJleHAiOjE0OTQ1OTE4MjcsImlhdCI6MTQ5NDU5MTUyNywibmJmIjoxNDk0NTkxNTI3LCJpZGVudGl0eSI6MTIzfQ.q0p02opL0OxL7EGD7wiLbXbdfP8xQ7rXf7-3Iggqdi4"
{
    "meaning_of_life": 42
}

curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private -H "Authorization: JWT eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJleHAiOjE0OTQ1OTE4MjcsImlhdCI6MTQ5NDU5MTUyNywibmJmIjoxNDk0NTkxNTI3LCJpZGVudGl0eSI6MTIzfQ.q0p02opL0OxL7EGD7wiLbXbdfP8xQ7rXf7-3Iggqdi4"

{

"meaning_of_life": 42

}

Whoa, it worked! Amazing, now our JWT authentication is working great!

Getting the Authenticated User

Once our JWT authentication is functional, we can get the currently authenticated user by using the current_identity object.

Let’s add the import:

from flask_jwt import JWT, jwt_required, current_identity

1	from flask_jwt import JWT, jwt_required, current_identity

And then let’s update our resource to return the logged in user identity.

class PrivateResource(Resource):
    @jwt_required()
    def get(self):
        return dict(current_identity)

class PrivateResource(Resource):

@jwt_required()

def get(self):

return dict(current_identity)

The current_identity object is a LocalProxy instance which can’t be directly JSON serialized. But if we pass it to a dict() call, we can get a dictionary representation.

Now let’s try it out:

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private -H "Authorization: JWT eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJleHAiOjE0OTQ1OTE4MjcsImlhdCI6MTQ5NDU5MTUyNywibmJmIjoxNDk0NTkxNTI3LCJpZGVudGl0eSI6MTIzfQ.q0p02opL0OxL7EGD7wiLbXbdfP8xQ7rXf7-3Iggqdi4"
{
    "user_id": 123
}

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private -H "Authorization: JWT eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJleHAiOjE0OTQ1OTE4MjcsImlhdCI6MTQ5NDU5MTUyNywibmJmIjoxNDk0NTkxNTI3LCJpZGVudGl0eSI6MTIzfQ.q0p02opL0OxL7EGD7wiLbXbdfP8xQ7rXf7-3Iggqdi4"

{

"user_id": 123

}

As we can see the current_identity object returns the exact same data our identity function returns because Flask JWT uses that function to load the user identity.

What’s Next?

Go ahead and implement the same functionality using PyJWT and your own code. You will need to create an endpoint that encodes current user data and returns the access token. Then you will need to intercept the http headers, parse the Authorization header and verify the JWT token. It should be a fun and yet excellent learning exercise.

Tags Flask, JWT, REST API

Python

Securing REST APIs: Basic HTTP Authentication with Python / Flask

Post author By masnun
Post date May 10, 2017
8 Comments on Securing REST APIs: Basic HTTP Authentication with Python / Flask

In our last tutorial on REST API Best Practices, we designed and implemented a very simple RESTful mailing list API. However our API (and the data) was open to public, anyone could read / add / delete subscribers from our mailing list. In serious projects, we definitely do not want that to happen. In this post, we will discuss how we can use http basic auth to authenticate our users and secure our APIs.

PS: If you are new to REST APIs, please check out REST APIs: Concepts and Applications to understand the fundamentals.

Setup API and Private Resource

Before we can move on to authentication, we first need to create some resources which we want to secure. For demonstration purposes, we will keep things simple. We will have a very simple endpoint like below:

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")


class PrivateResource(Resource):
    def get(self):
        return {"meaning_of_life": 42}


api.add_resource(PrivateResource, '/private')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

from flask import Flask

from flask_restful import Resource, Api

app = Flask(__name__)

api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

class PrivateResource(Resource):

def get(self):

return {"meaning_of_life": 42}

api.add_resource(PrivateResource, '/private')

if __name__ == '__main__':

app.run(debug=True)

If we launch the server and access the endpoint, we will get the expected output:

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private
{
    "meaning_of_life": 42
}

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private

{

"meaning_of_life": 42

}

Our API is for now public. Anyone can access it. Let’s secure it so it’s no longer publicly accessible.

Basic HTTP Authentication

The idea of Basic HTTP Authentication is pretty simple. When we request a resource, the server sends back a header that looks something like this: WWW-Authenticate →Basic realm=”Authentication Required”. Generally when we try to access such resources from a browser, the browser shows us a prompt to enter username and password. The browser then base64 encodes the data and sends back an Authorization header. The server parses the data and verifies the user. If the user is legit, the resource is accessible, otherwise we are not granted permission to access it.

While using a REST Client, we would very often need to pass the credentials before hand, while we make the request. For example, if we’re using curl, we need to pass the --user option while running the command.

Basic HTTP Authentication is a very old method but quite easy to setup. Flask HTTPAuth is a nice extension that would help us with that.

Install Dependencies

Before we can start writing codes, we need to have the necessary packages installed. We can install the package using pip:

pip install Flask-HTTPAuth

1	pip install Flask-HTTPAuth

Once the package is installed, we can use it to add authentication to our API endpoints.

Require Login

We will import the HTTPBasicAuth class and create a new instance named auth. It’s important to note that name because we will be using methods on this auth instance as decorators for various purposes. For example, we will use the @auth.login_required decorator to make sure only logged in users can access the resource.

In our resource, we added the above mentioned decorator to our get method. So if anyone wants to GET that resource, s/he needs to login first. The code looks like this:

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api
from flask_httpauth import HTTPBasicAuth

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")
auth = HTTPBasicAuth()


class PrivateResource(Resource):
    @auth.login_required
    def get(self):
        return {"meaning_of_life": 42}


api.add_resource(PrivateResource, '/private')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

from flask import Flask

from flask_restful import Resource, Api

from flask_httpauth import HTTPBasicAuth

app = Flask(__name__)

api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

auth = HTTPBasicAuth()

class PrivateResource(Resource):

@auth.login_required

def get(self):

return {"meaning_of_life": 42}

api.add_resource(PrivateResource, '/private')

if __name__ == '__main__':

app.run(debug=True)

If we try to access the resource without logging in, we will get an error telling us we’re not authorized. Let’s send a quick request using curl.

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private
Unauthorized Access

1 2	$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private Unauthorized Access

So it worked. Our API endpoint is now no longer public. We need to login before we can access it. And from the API developer’s perspective, we need to let the users login before they can access our API. How do we do that?

Handling User Logins

We would generally store our users in a database. Well, a secured database. And of course, we would never store user password in plain text. But for this tutorial, we would store the user credentials in a dictionary. The password will be in plain text.

Flask HTTP Auth will handle the authentication process for us. We just need to tell it how to verify the user with his/her username and password. The @auth.verify_password decorator can be used to register a function that will receive the username and password. This function will verify if the credentials are correct and based on it’s return value, HTTP Auth extension will handle the user auth.

In the following code snippet, we register the verify function as the callback for verifying user credentials. When the user passes the credentials, this function will be called. If the function returns True, the user will be accepted as authorized. If it returns False, the user will be rejected. We have kept our data in the USER_DATA dictionary.

USER_DATA = {
    "admin": "SuperSecretPwd"
}


@auth.verify_password
def verify(username, password):
    if not (username and password):
        return False
    return USER_DATA.get(username) == password

USER_DATA = {

"admin": "SuperSecretPwd"

}

@auth.verify_password

def verify(username, password):

if not (username and password):

return False

return USER_DATA.get(username) == password

Once we have added the above code, we can now test if the auth works.

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private --user admin:SuperSecretPwd
{
    "meaning_of_life": 42
}

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private --user admin:SuperSecretPwd

{

"meaning_of_life": 42

}

But if we omit the auth credentials, does it work?

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private
Unauthorized Access

1 2	$ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000/api/v1/private Unauthorized Access

It doesn’t work without the login. Perfect! We now have a secured API endpoint that uses basic http auth. But in all seriousness, it’s not recommended. That’s right, do not use it in the public internet. It’s perhaps okay to use inside a private network. Why? Please read this thread.

Wrapping Up

With the changes made, here’s the full code for this tutorial:

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api
from flask_httpauth import HTTPBasicAuth

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")
auth = HTTPBasicAuth()

USER_DATA = {
    "admin": "SuperSecretPwd"
}


@auth.verify_password
def verify(username, password):
    if not (username and password):
        return False
    return USER_DATA.get(username) == password


class PrivateResource(Resource):
    @auth.login_required
    def get(self):
        return {"meaning_of_life": 42}


api.add_resource(PrivateResource, '/private')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

from flask import Flask

from flask_restful import Resource, Api

from flask_httpauth import HTTPBasicAuth

app = Flask(__name__)

api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

auth = HTTPBasicAuth()

USER_DATA = {

"admin": "SuperSecretPwd"

}

@auth.verify_password

def verify(username, password):

if not (username and password):

return False

return USER_DATA.get(username) == password

class PrivateResource(Resource):

@auth.login_required

def get(self):

return {"meaning_of_life": 42}

api.add_resource(PrivateResource, '/private')

if __name__ == '__main__':

app.run(debug=True)

As discussed in the last section, it’s not recommended to use basic http authentication in open / public systems. However, it is good to know how http basic auth works and it’s simplicity makes beginners grasp the concept of authentication / API security quite easily.

You might be wondering – “If we don’t use http auth, then what do we use instead to secure our REST APIs?”. In our next tutorial on REST APIs, we would demonstrating how we can use JSON Web Tokens aka JWT to secure our APIs. Can’t wait for that long? Go ahead and read the introduction.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the mailing list so when I write the next post, you get a notification!

Tags Flask

Python

REST API Best Practices: Python & Flask Tutorial

Post author By masnun
Post date May 6, 2017

In our last post about REST APIs, we have learned the basics of how REST APIs function. In this post, we would see how we can develop our own REST APIs. We would use Python and Flask for that. If you are new to Python, we have you covered with our Python: Learning Resources and Guidelines post.

Python / Flask code is pretty simple and easy to read / understand. So if you just want to grasp the best practices of REST API design but lack Python skills, don’t worry, you will understand most of it. However, I would recommend you try out the codes hands on. Writing codes by hand is a very effective learning method. We learn more by doing than we learn by reading or watching.

Installing Flask and Flask-RESTful

We will be using the Flask framework along with Flask-RESTful. Flask-RESTful is an excellent package that makes building REST APIs with Flask both easy and pleasant. Before we can start building our app, we first need to install these packages.

pip install flask
pip install flask-restful

1 2	pip install flask pip install flask-restful

Once we have the necessary packages installed, we can start thinking about our API design.

RESTful Mailing List

You see, I just recently started this Polyglot.Ninja() website and I am getting some readers to my site. Some of my readers have shown very keen interest to receive regular updates from this blog. To keep them posted, I have been thinking about building a mailing list where people can subscribe with their email address. These addresses get stored in a database and then when I have new posts to share, I email them. Can we build this mailing list “service” as a REST API?

The way I imagine it – we will have a “subscribers” collection with many subscriber. Each subscriber will provide us with their full name and email address. We should be able to add new subscriber, update them, delete them, list them and get individual data. Sounds simple? Let’s do this!

Choosing a sensible URL

We have decided to build our awesome mailing list REST API. For development and testing purposes, we will run the app on my local machine. So the base URL would be http://localhost:5000. This part will change when we deploy the API on a production server. So we probably don’t need to worry about it.

However, for API, the url path should make sense. It should clearly state it’s intent. A good choice would be something like /api/ as the root url of the API. And then we can add the resources, so for subscribers, it can be /api/subscribers. Please note that it’s both acceptable to have the resource part singular (ie. /api/subscriber) or plural (/api/subscribers). However, most of the people I have talked to and the articles I have read, more people like the plural form.

API Versioning: Header vs URL

We need to think about the future of the API before hand. This is our first iteration. In the future, we might want to introduce newer changes. Some of those changes can be breaking changes. If people are still using some of the older features which you can’t break while pushing new changes, it’s time you thought about versioning your API. It is always best practice to version your API from the beginning.

The first version of the api can be called v1. Now there are two common method of versioning APIs – 1) Passing a header that specifies the desired version of the API 2) Put the version info directly in the URL. There are arguments and counter arguments for both approaches. However, versioning using url is easier and more often seen in common public APIs.

So we accommodate the version info in our url and we make it – /api/v1/subscribers. Like discussed in our previous REST article, we will have two types of resources here – “subscriber collection” (ie. /subscribers) and “individual subscriber” elements (ie. /subscribers/17). With the design decided upon and a bigger picture in our head, let’s get to writing some codes.

RESTful Hello World

Before we start writing our actual logic, let’s first get a hello world app running. This will make sure that we have got everything setup properly. If we head over to the Flask-RESTful Quickstart page, we can easily obtain a hello world code sample from there.

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app)


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


api.add_resource(HelloWorld, '/')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

from flask import Flask

from flask_restful import Resource, Api

app = Flask(__name__)

api = Api(app)

class HelloWorld(Resource):

def get(self):

return {'hello': 'world'}

api.add_resource(HelloWorld, '/')

if __name__ == '__main__':

app.run(debug=True)

Let’s save this code in a file named main.py and run it like this:

python main.py

1	python main.py

If the code runs successfully, our app will launch a web server here – http://127.0.0.1:5000/. Let’s break down the code a bit:

We import the necessary modules (Flask and Flask-RESTful stuff).
Then we create a new Flask app and then wrap it in Api.
Afterwards, we declare our HelloWorld resource which extends Resource.
On our resource, we define what the get http verb will do.
Add the resource to our API.
Finally run the app.

What happens here, when we write our Resources, Flask-RESTful generates the routes and the view handlers necessary to represent the resource over RESTful HTTP. Now let’s see, if we visit the url, do we get the message we set?

If we visit the url, we would see the expected response:

{
    "hello": "world"
}

{

"hello": "world"

}

Trying out REST APIs

While we develop our api, it is essential that we can try out / test the API to make sure it’s working as expected. We need a way to call our api and inspect the output. If you’re a command line ninja, you would probably love to use curl. Try this on your terminal:

➜ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000
{
    "hello": "world"
}
➜

➜ curl -X GET http://localhost:5000

{

"hello": "world"

}

➜

This would send a GET request to the URL and curl would print out the response on the terminal. It is a very versatile tool and can do a lot of amazing things. If you would like to use curl on a regular basis, you may want to dive deeper into the options / features / use cases. These can help you:

However, if you like command line but want a friendlier and easier command line tool, definitely look at httpie.

Now what if you’re not a CLI person? And we can agree that sometimes GUI can be much more productive to use. Don’t worry, Postman is a great app!

If you are developing and testing a REST API, Postman is a must have app!

postman interface — Our newly created API in Postman

Back to Business

We now have a basic skeleton ready and we know how to test our API. Let’s start writing our mailing list logic. Let’s first layout our resources with some sample data. For this example, we shall not bother about persisting the data to some database. We will store the data in memory. Let’s use a list as our subscriber data source for now.

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

users = [
    {"email": "masnun@gmail.com", "name": "Masnun", "id": 1}
]


class SubscriberCollection(Resource):
    def get(self):
        return {"msg": "All subscribers "}

    def post(self):
        return {"msg": "We will create new subscribers here"}


class Subscriber(Resource):
    def get(self, id):
        return {"msg": "Details about user id {}".format(id)}

    def put(self, id):
        return {"msg": "Update user id {}".format(id)}

    def delete(self, id):
        return {"msg": "Delete user id {}".format(id)}


api.add_resource(SubscriberCollection, '/subscribers')
api.add_resource(Subscriber, '/subscribers/&lt;int:id&gt;')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

from flask import Flask

from flask_restful import Resource, Api

app = Flask(__name__)

api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

users = [

{"email": "masnun@gmail.com", "name": "Masnun", "id": 1}

]

class SubscriberCollection(Resource):

def get(self):

return {"msg": "All subscribers "}

def post(self):

return {"msg": "We will create new subscribers here"}

class Subscriber(Resource):

def get(self, id):

return {"msg": "Details about user id {}".format(id)}

def put(self, id):

return {"msg": "Update user id {}".format(id)}

def delete(self, id):

return {"msg": "Delete user id {}".format(id)}

api.add_resource(SubscriberCollection, '/subscribers')

api.add_resource(Subscriber, '/subscribers/<int:id>')

if __name__ == '__main__':

app.run(debug=True)

What changes are notable here?

Note we added a prefix to the Api for versioning reason. All our urls will be prefixed by /api/v1.
We created a list named users to store the subscribers.
We created two resources – SubscriberCollection and Subscriber.
Defined the relevant http method handlers. For now the response just describes the intended purpose of that method.
We add both resources to our api. Note how we added the id parameter to the url. This id is available to all the methods defined on Subscriber.

Fire up the local development server and try out the API. Works fine? Let’s move on!

Parsing Request Data

We have to accept, validate and process user data. In our cases, they would be the subscriber information. Each subscriber would have an email address, a full name and ID. If we used a database, this ID would have been auto generated. Since we are not using a database, we would accept this as part of the incoming request.

For processing request data, the RequestParser can be very helpful. We will use it in our POST calls to /api/subscribers/ to validate incoming data and store the subscriber if the data is valid. Here’s the updated code so far:

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api
from flask_restful.reqparse import RequestParser

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

users = [
    {"email": "masnun@gmail.com", "name": "Masnun", "id": 1}
]

subscriber_request_parser = RequestParser(bundle_errors=True)
subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("name", type=str, required=True, help="Name has to be valid string")
subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("email", required=True)
subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("id", type=int, required=True, help="Please enter valid integer as ID")


class SubscriberCollection(Resource):
    def get(self):
        return users

    def post(self):
        args = subscriber_request_parser.parse_args()
        users.append(args)
        return {"msg": "Subscriber added", "subscriber_data": args}


class Subscriber(Resource):
    def get(self, id):
        return {"msg": "Details about user id {}".format(id)}

    def put(self, id):
        return {"msg": "Update user id {}".format(id)}

    def delete(self, id):
        return {"msg": "Delete user id {}".format(id)}


api.add_resource(SubscriberCollection, '/subscribers')
api.add_resource(Subscriber, '/subscribers/&lt;int:id&gt;')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

from flask import Flask

from flask_restful import Resource, Api

from flask_restful.reqparse import RequestParser

app = Flask(__name__)

api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

users = [

{"email": "masnun@gmail.com", "name": "Masnun", "id": 1}

]

subscriber_request_parser = RequestParser(bundle_errors=True)

subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("name", type=str, required=True, help="Name has to be valid string")

subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("email", required=True)

subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("id", type=int, required=True, help="Please enter valid integer as ID")

class SubscriberCollection(Resource):

def get(self):

return users

def post(self):

args = subscriber_request_parser.parse_args()

users.append(args)

return {"msg": "Subscriber added", "subscriber_data": args}

class Subscriber(Resource):

def get(self, id):

return {"msg": "Details about user id {}".format(id)}

def put(self, id):

return {"msg": "Update user id {}".format(id)}

def delete(self, id):

return {"msg": "Delete user id {}".format(id)}

api.add_resource(SubscriberCollection, '/subscribers')

api.add_resource(Subscriber, '/subscribers/<int:id>')

if __name__ == '__main__':

app.run(debug=True)

Here we have made two key changes:

We created a new instance of RequestParser and added arguments so it knows which fields to accept and how to validate those.
We added the request parsing code in the post method. If the request is valid, it will return the validated data. If the data is not valid, we don’t have to worry about it, the error message will be sent to the user.

Testing the request parser

If we try to pass invalid data, we will get error messages. For example, if we request without any data, we will get something like this:

{
  "message": {
    "email": "Missing required parameter in the JSON body or the post body or the query string",
    "id": "Please enter valid integer as ID",
    "name": "Name has to be valid string"
  }
}

{

"message": {

"email": "Missing required parameter in the JSON body or the post body or the query string",

"id": "Please enter valid integer as ID",

"name": "Name has to be valid string"

}

But if we pass valid data, everything works fine. Here’s an example of valid data:

{"email": "john@polyglot.ninja", "name": "John Smith", "id": 3}

1	{"email": "john@polyglot.ninja", "name": "John Smith", "id": 3}

This will get us the following response:

{
  "msg": "Subscriber added",
  "subscriber_data": {
    "email": "john@polyglot.ninja",
    "id": 3,
    "name": "John Smith"
  }
}

{

"msg": "Subscriber added",

"subscriber_data": {

"email": "john@polyglot.ninja",

"id": 3,

"name": "John Smith"

}

Cool, now we know how to validate user data 🙂 Please remember – never trust user input. Always validate and sanitize user data to avoid security risks.

Next, we need to implement the user level updates.

Subscriber Views

We went ahead and completed the code for the rest of the methods. The updated code now looks like this:

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api
from flask_restful.reqparse import RequestParser

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

users = [
    {"email": "masnun@gmail.com", "name": "Masnun", "id": 1}
]


def get_user_by_id(user_id):
    for x in users:
        if x.get("id") == int(user_id):
            return x


subscriber_request_parser = RequestParser(bundle_errors=True)
subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("name", type=str, required=True, help="Name has to be valid string")
subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("email", required=True)
subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("id", type=int, required=True, help="Please enter valid integer as ID")


class SubscriberCollection(Resource):
    def get(self):
        return users

    def post(self):
        args = subscriber_request_parser.parse_args()
        users.append(args)
        return {"msg": "Subscriber added", "subscriber_data": args}


class Subscriber(Resource):
    def get(self, id):
        user = get_user_by_id(id)
        if not user:
            return {"error": "User not found"}

        return user

    def put(self, id):
        args = subscriber_request_parser.parse_args()
        user = get_user_by_id(id)
        if user:
            users.remove(user)
            users.append(args)

        return args

    def delete(self, id):
        user = get_user_by_id(id)
        if user:
            users.remove(user)

        return {"message": "Deleted"}


api.add_resource(SubscriberCollection, '/subscribers')
api.add_resource(Subscriber, '/subscribers/&lt;int:id&gt;')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

from flask import Flask

from flask_restful import Resource, Api

from flask_restful.reqparse import RequestParser

app = Flask(__name__)

api = Api(app, prefix="/api/v1")

users = [

{"email": "masnun@gmail.com", "name": "Masnun", "id": 1}

]

def get_user_by_id(user_id):

for x in users:

if x.get("id") == int(user_id):

return x

subscriber_request_parser = RequestParser(bundle_errors=True)

subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("name", type=str, required=True, help="Name has to be valid string")

subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("email", required=True)

subscriber_request_parser.add_argument("id", type=int, required=True, help="Please enter valid integer as ID")

class SubscriberCollection(Resource):

def get(self):

return users

def post(self):

args = subscriber_request_parser.parse_args()

users.append(args)

return {"msg": "Subscriber added", "subscriber_data": args}

class Subscriber(Resource):

def get(self, id):

user = get_user_by_id(id)

if not user:

return {"error": "User not found"}

return user

def put(self, id):

args = subscriber_request_parser.parse_args()

user = get_user_by_id(id)

if user:

users.remove(user)

users.append(args)

return args

def delete(self, id):

user = get_user_by_id(id)

if user:

users.remove(user)

return {"message": "Deleted"}

api.add_resource(SubscriberCollection, '/subscribers')

api.add_resource(Subscriber, '/subscribers/<int:id>')

if __name__ == '__main__':

app.run(debug=True)

What did we do?

We added a helper function to find users from the list by it’s id
The update view works – we can update the user data. In our case we’re deleting the data and adding the new data. In real life, we would use UPDATE on the database.
Delete method works fine!

Feel free to go ahead and test the endpoints!

HTTP Status Codes

Our mailing list is functional now. It works! We have made good progress so far. But there’s something very important that we haven’t done yet. Our API doesn’t use proper http status codes. When we send response back to the client, we should also give it a status code. This code would help the client better interpret the results.

Have you ever visited a website and saw “404 Not found” error? Well, 404 is the status code, that means the document / resource you were looking for is not available. Saw any “500 Internal Server Error” lately? Now you know what that 500 means.

We can see the complete list of http status codes here: https://httpstatuses.com/.

Also depending on whether you’re a cat person or a dog enthusiast, these websites can explain things better:

So let’s fix our code and start sending appropriate codes. We can return an optional status code from our views. So when we add a new subscriber, we can send 201 Created like this:

return {"msg": "Subscriber added", "subscriber_data": args}, 201

1	return {"msg": "Subscriber added", "subscriber_data": args}, 201

And when we delete the user, we can send 204.

return None, 204

1	return None, 204

What’s next?

We have made decent progress today. We have designed and implemented a very basic API. We chose a sensible url, considered API versioning, did input validation and sent appropriate http status codes. We have done good. But what we have seen here is a very simple implementation. There are a lot of scope of improvements here. For example, our API is still open to public, there is no authentication enabled. So anyone with malicious intentions can flood / spam our mailing list database. We need to secure the API in that regard. We also don’t have a home page that uses HATEOAS to guide the clients. We don’t yet have documentation – always remember, the documentation is very important. We developers often don’t feel like writing documentation but well written documentation helps the consumers of your API consume it better and with ease. So do provide excellent docs!

I don’t know when – but in our next post on REST APIs, we shall explore more into the wonderful world of API development. And may be we shall also talk about some micro services? If you would like to know when I post those contents, do subscribe to the mailing list. You can find a subscription form on the sidebar.

And if you liked the post, do share with your friends 🙂

Tags Flask, REST API

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