Flask-RESTPlus Has What You Need

Flask and HTTP methods

Flask is a micro-framework, and we can use it to create a REST API by connecting routes and specifying HTTP methods (for example, GET, POST), parsing input and output JSON strings, and handling errors. An easier approach is to use the batteries-included package flask-restplus.

Flask-RESTPlus

If you want to work on it on your local system, you can install it using pipenv in your project directory.

pipenv install flask-restplus flask-cors

Here, we’ve also installed flask-cors, which will make it easier later to develop the front-end and back-end at the same time.

Using Flask-RESTPlus classes

Let’s start with a small example of a Flask app that uses the Resource and API classes provided by Flask-RESTPlus. This example defines an API on the route /my-api and is used to track the favorite numbers listed in the code below. It provides a GET method to get the list of all numbers in the list, and a POST method to record a new favorite number. Each item must have its own unique ID so that it can be accessed directly. In this case, they’ll be accessed through /my-api/<id>.