Awesome web-browseable Web APIs.
Note: Full documentation for the project is available at http://django-rest-framework.org.
Django REST framework is a powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.
Some reasons you might want to use REST framework:
- The Web browseable API is a huge useability win for your developers.
- Authentication policies including OAuth1a and OAuth2 out of the box.
- Serialization that supports both ORM and non-ORM data sources.
- Customizable all the way down - just use regular function-based views if you don't need the more powerful features.
- Extensive documentation, and great community support.
There is a live example API for testing purposes, available here.
Below: Screenshot from the browseable API
- Python (2.6.5+, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3)
- Django (1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6)
Install using pip...
pip install djangorestframework
Add 'rest_framework' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
'rest_framework',
)
Let's take a look at a quick example of using REST framework to build a simple model-backed API for accessing users and groups.
Here's our project's root urls.py module:
from django.conf.urls.defaults import url, patterns, include
from django.contrib.auth.models import User, Group
from rest_framework import viewsets, routers
# ViewSets define the view behavior.
class UserViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
model = User
class GroupViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
model = Group
# Routers provide an easy way of automatically determining the URL conf
router = routers.DefaultRouter()
router.register(r'users', UserViewSet)
router.register(r'groups', GroupViewSet)
# Wire up our API using automatic URL routing.
# Additionally, we include login URLs for the browseable API.
urlpatterns = patterns('',
url(r'^', include(router.urls)),
url(r'^api-auth/', include('rest_framework.urls', namespace='rest_framework'))
)
We'd also like to configure a couple of settings for our API.
Add the following to your settings.py module:
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
# Use hyperlinked styles by default.
# Only used if the `serializer_class` attribute is not set on a view.
'DEFAULT_MODEL_SERIALIZER_CLASS':
'rest_framework.serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer',
# Use Django's standard `django.contrib.auth` permissions,
# or allow read-only access for unauthenticated users.
'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': [
'rest_framework.permissions.DjangoModelPermissionsOrAnonReadOnly'
]
}
Don't forget to make sure you've also added rest_framework to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
That's it, we're done!
Full documentation for the project is available at http://django-rest-framework.org.
For questions and support, use the REST framework discussion group, or #restframework on freenode IRC.
You may also want to follow the author on Twitter.
If you believe you’ve found something in Django REST framework which has security implications, please do not raise the issue in a public forum.
Send a description of the issue via email to [email protected]. The project maintainers will then work with you to resolve any issues where required, prior to any public disclosure.
Copyright (c) 2011-2013, Tom Christie All rights reserved.
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