Introduction to FastAPI

Understand the core concepts of FastAPI, how it compares to other web frameworks, and its advantages in building APIs, especially for user authentication.

What is FastAPI?

FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance) web framework for building APIs with Python 3.7+ based on standard Python type hints. Its key features include automatic API documentation, data validation, serialization, and asynchronous request handling. FastAPI is designed to make it easy to create a web API that is fast to code, easy to understand, and ready for production.

Core Features of FastAPI

• Speed: FastAPI provides very high performance, on par with NodeJS and Go, thanks to Starlette for the web parts and Pydantic for the data parts.
• Quick Coding: Its design allows for fast development. Define your API using Python type hints, and FastAPI does the rest.
• Automatic Documentation: With FastAPI, you get interactive API documentation automatically generated via Swagger UI and ReDoc.
• Data Validation and Serialization: Uses Pydantic for data validation, serialization, and model binding, ensuring that the data your API receives and sends is correct.
• Asynchronous Support: FastAPI supports asynchronous request handling, making it suitable for high-concurrency situations like handling user authentication and interaction.

Why FastAPI for User Authentication?

Choosing FastAPI for user authentication in your project comes with several benefits:

• Security: FastAPI includes several built-in security features, such as support for OAuth2 with Password (and hashing), JWT tokens, and more, which are crucial for authentication systems.
• Scalability: The asynchronous support makes it easy to scale your authentication system for a high number of requests.
• Developer Experience: The automatic documentation and type hinting make developing and testing your API a breeze.

First Steps with FastAPI

Let’s create a simple FastAPI application to understand its structure:

1. Create a Main Application File:

In your project directory, ensure you have a file named main.py. This file will be the entry point for your FastAPI application.

1. Write Your First FastAPI Code:

Open main.py and add the following code:

from fastapi import FastAPI

app = FastAPI()

@app.get("/")
def read_root():
    return {"Hello": "World"}

1. Run Your FastAPI Application:

Use the following command to run your application:

uvicorn main:app --reload

The --reload flag makes the server restart after code changes. This is useful during development but should be removed in production.

Testing Your API

With your FastAPI application running, visit http://127.0.0.1:8000 in your web browser. You should see a response from your API.

Exploring the Automatic Documentation

FastAPI automatically generates documentation for your API. Access this documentation by visiting http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs for the Swagger UI or http://127.0.0.1:8000/redoc for ReDoc.

Summary

You’ve now created your first FastAPI application and explored some of its core features. In the coming lessons, we’ll dive deeper into building a user authentication system, starting with modeling our user data.

Additional Resources

• FastAPI Official Documentation
• Pydantic Documentation

Lesson Assignment

Experiment with adding another route to your FastAPI application. Try returning different types of data, such as a list or a dictionary with nested data. Reflect on how FastAPI’s automatic documentation updates with your changes.

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