Designing APIs with Flask: the Ez Way

Sup people, I was designing an API yesterday, and I was like this takes too long. Coding should be fun, so here’s what I’ve done to make it ez and fun again.

U gotta know some python3 (functions, decorators & asterisk magic) to understand the following.

So the basic idea is that I’ll write an api decorator rather than using app.route every time.

Ez flask is the way to go

So let’s talk about the mess above. First, I create a restricted decorator so that all calls to my api will need a username and a password. *args and **kwargs allow me to pass all the extra parameters to the decorated function.

The api decorator handles the app.route for me. That function.__name__ is the name of the function that is being decorated (i.e. update).

Another interesting method is that I’ve taken the extra arguments in path format ( <path:otherArgs>) and parsed it.

Another trick

If you’re tired of writing prints all over your code, then I got another treat for you.

DEBUG = True
def dbg_print(*args, **kwargs):
    if DEBUG:
        print(*args, **kwargs)

Voila! Now you can turn ’em off. (Wanna learn more about starry stuff.)

If you learned something new, consider 👏. Please comment your improvements and modifications.