Quickstart

We're going to create a simple API to allow admin users to view and edit the users and groups in the system.

Create a new Django project, and start a new app called quickstart. Once you've set up a database and got everything synced and ready to go open up the app's directory and we'll get coding...

Serializers

First up we're going to define some serializers in quickstart/serializers.py that we'll use for our data representations.

from django.contrib.auth.models import User, Group
from rest_framework import serializers


class UserSerializer(serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = User
        fields = ('url', 'username', 'email', 'groups')


class GroupSerializer(serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Group
        fields = ('url', 'name')

Notice that we're using hyperlinked relations in this case, with HyperlinkedModelSerializer. You can also use primary key and various other relationships, but hyperlinking is good RESTful design.

Views

Right, we'd better write some views then. Open quickstart/views.py and get typing.

from django.contrib.auth.models import User, Group
from rest_framework import viewsets
from quickstart.serializers import UserSerializer, GroupSerializer


class UserViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    """
    API endpoint that allows users to be viewed or edited.
    """
    queryset = User.objects.all()
    serializer_class = UserSerializer


class GroupViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    """
    API endpoint that allows groups to be viewed or edited.
    """
    queryset = Group.objects.all()
    serializer_class = GroupSerializer

Rather that write multiple views we're grouping together all the common behavior into classes called ViewSets.

We can easily break these down into individual views if we need to, but using viewsets keeps the view logic nicely organized as well as being very concise.

URLs

Okay, now let's wire up the API URLs. On to quickstart/urls.py...

from django.conf.urls import patterns, url, include
from rest_framework import routers
from quickstart import views

router = routers.DefaultRouter()
router.register(r'users', views.UserViewSet)
router.register(r'groups', views.GroupViewSet)

# Wire up our API using automatic URL routing.
# Additionally, we include login URLs for the browseable API.
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^', include(router.urls)),
    url(r'^api-auth/', include('rest_framework.urls', namespace='rest_framework'))
)

Because we're using viewsets instead of views, we can automatically generate the URL conf for our API, by simply registering the viewsets with a router class.

Again, if we need more control over the API URLs we can simply drop down to using regular class based views, and writing the URL conf explicitly.

Note that we're also including default login and logout views for use with the browsable API. That's optional, but useful if your API requires authentication and you want to use the browseable API.

Settings

We'd also like to set a few global settings. We'd like to turn on pagination, and we want our API to only be accessible to admin users.

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'rest_framework',
)

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': ('rest_framework.permissions.IsAdminUser',),
    'PAGINATE_BY': 10
}

Okay, we're done.

Testing our API

We can now access our API, both from the command-line, using tools like curl...

bash: curl -H 'Accept: application/json; indent=4' -u admin:password http://127.0.0.1:8000/users/ 
{
    "count": 2, 
    "next": null, 
    "previous": null, 
    "results": [
        {
            "email": "admin@example.com", 
            "groups": [], 
            "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8000/users/1/", 
            "username": "admin"
        }, 
        {
            "email": "tom@example.com", 
            "groups": [                ], 
            "url": "http://127.0.0.1:8000/users/2/", 
            "username": "tom"
        }
    ]
}

Or directly through the browser...

Great, that was easy!

If you want to get a more in depth understanding of how REST framework fits together head on over to the tutorial, or start browsing the API guide.

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