Django Rest Framework

Simple barebones read-only API

Assuming you have a model that looks like the following, we will get up an running with a simple barebones read-only API driven by Django REST Framework (“DRF”).

models.py

class FeedItem(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=True)
    url = models.URLField(blank=True)
    style = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=True)
    description = models.TextField(blank=True)

The serializer is the component that will take all of the information from the Django model (in this case the FeedItem) and turn it into JSON. It is very similar to creating form classes in Django. If you have any experience in that, this will be very comfortable for you.

serializers.py

from rest_framework import serializers
from . import models

class FeedItemSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = models.FeedItem
        fields = ('title', 'url', 'description', 'style')

views.py

DRF offers many view classes to handle a variety of use cases. In this example, we are only going to have a read-only API, so, rather than using a more comprehensive viewset, or a bunch of related generic views, we will use a single subclass of DRF’s ListAPIView.

The purpose of this class is to link the data with the serializer, and wrap it all together for a response object.

from rest_framework import generics
from . import serializers, models

class FeedItemList(generics.ListAPIView):
    serializer_class = serializers.FeedItemSerializer
    queryset = models.FeedItem.objects.all()

urls.py

Make sure you point your route to your DRF view.

from django.conf.urls import url
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    url(r'path/to/api', views.FeedItemList.as_view()),
]