Building a CRUD Application with FastAPI

Step-by-step guide to creating a basic CRUD application using FastAPI and Pydantic, covering database integration, endpoint creation, and testing.

By Kevin McAleer,    3 Minutes

Introduction to CRUD Applications

CRUD applications are foundational to web development, allowing users to create, read, update, and delete resources. This lesson will demonstrate how to build a simple CRUD API for a resource like Item using FastAPI and Pydantic, including database integration and API testing.

Setting Up Your Project

Start by setting up a new FastAPI project and create a Pydantic model to represent the Item resource:

from pydantic import BaseModel

class Item(BaseModel):
    name: str
    description: str = None
    price: float
    in_stock: bool = True

Database Integration

For simplicity, we’ll use an in-memory dictionary as our database. In a real-world scenario, you might integrate with SQL or NoSQL databases using ORMs or database drivers.

# This will act as our fake database
items_db = {}

Creating CRUD Endpoints

Implement the CRUD operations as FastAPI endpoints. Each operation corresponds to a standard HTTP method: POST for create, GET for read, PUT for update, and DELETE for delete.

Create an Item

from fastapi import FastAPI, HTTPException

app = FastAPI()

@app.post("/items/")
async def create_item(item: Item):
    if item.name in items_db:
        raise HTTPException(status_code=400, detail="Item already exists")
    items_db[item.name] = item
    return item

Read an Item

@app.get("/items/{item_name}")
async def read_item(item_name: str):
    if item_name not in items_db:
        raise HTTPException(status_code=404, detail="Item not found")
    return items_db[item_name]

Update an Item

@app.put("/items/{item_name}")
async def update_item(item_name: str, item: Item):
    if item_name not in items_db:
        raise HTTPException(status_code=404, detail="Item not found")
    items_db[item_name] = item
    return item

Delete an Item

@app.delete("/items/{item_name}")
async def delete_item(item_name: str):
    if item_name not in items_db:
        raise HTTPException(status_code=404, detail="Item not found")
    del items_db[item_name]
    return {"message": "Item deleted successfully"}

Testing Your CRUD Application

After defining your endpoints, test your CRUD API using FastAPI’s automatic documentation (accessible at /docs) or tools like Postman and curl.

Lesson Assignment

Extend the CRUD application by adding another resource, such as User, with its own set of CRUD endpoints. Consider implementing additional features like pagination for the read operation or validation checks for the create and update operations.

Additional Resources

• FastAPI Official Documentation
• Pydantic Documentation