Flask-Sandboy

Flask-Sandboy is sandman's litte brother. Like sandman, Flask-Sandboy automatically generates REST APIs. Unlike sandman, it does so from existing Flask-SQLAlchemy models.

tl;dr Flask-Sandboy gives your models a RESTful HTTP endpoint automagically, with proper support for all HTTP methods. It takes two lines of code to use and has no dependencies.

Installation

Flask-Sandboy should be installed using pip:

$ pip install flask-sandboy

Usage

Here is an example runserver.py for an existing Flask app with Flask-SQLAlchemy models:

from flask import Flask
from models import Machine, Cloud, db

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'sqlite:///db.sqlite3'
db.init_app(app)
with app.app_context():
    db.create_all()
app.run(debug=True)

And here is that same app with RESTful endpoints automatically created and managed by Flask-Sandboy

from flask import Flask
from flask.ext.sandboy import Sandboy

from models import Machine, Cloud, db

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'sqlite:///db.sqlite3'
db.init_app(app)
with app.app_context():
    db.create_all()
sandboy = Sandboy(app, db, [Cloud, Machine])
app.run(debug=True)

The only thing you need to do is instantiate the Sandboy class with your app, your Flask-SQLAlchemy object (typically named db), and a list of Model classes for which you want REST endpoints created.

Start the server and let's test out our new REST API:

$ http -vv -j POST localhost:5000/cloud name=first_cloud description="my first cloud"                                                                      master
POST /cloud HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, compress
Content-Length: 56
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Host: localhost:5000
User-Agent: HTTPie/0.8.0

{
    "description": "my first cloud",
    "name": "first_cloud"
}

HTTP/1.0 201 CREATED
Content-Length: 75
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Tue, 06 May 2014 13:57:52 GMT
Server: Werkzeug/0.9.4 Python/2.7.6

{
    "description": "my first cloud",
    "id": 1,
    "name": "first_cloud"
}

$ http localhost:5000/cloud/1                                                                                                                                       master
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Length: 75
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Tue, 06 May 2014 13:53:18 GMT
Server: Werkzeug/0.9.4 Python/2.7.6

{
    "description": "my first cloud",
    "id": 1,
    "name": "first_cloud"
}

$ http DELETE :5000/cloud/1                                                                                                                                master
HTTP/1.0 204 NO CONTENT
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Date: Tue, 06 May 2014 13:53:23 GMT
Server: Werkzeug/0.9.4 Python/2.7.6

All common HTTP methods are implemented (HEAD, OPTIONS, GET, DELETE, POST, PATCH, PUT) with proper HTTP status codes.

Validating Requests

Flask-Sandboy comes with built-in request validation, ensuring that all fields necessary to save the object to the database are present. Here's what happens when we forget to include a field:

$ http -j POST :5000/cloud name="bad cloud"                                                                                                          develop
HTTP/1.0 403 FORBIDDEN
Content-Length: 45
Content-Type: application/json
Date: Tue, 06 May 2014 14:05:52 GMT
Server: Werkzeug/0.9.4 Python/2.7.6

{
    "message": "cloud.description required"
}

Pagination

Flask-Sandboy supports pagination of results by default. Simply add a <model_name>?page=2 to your request to get paginated results. By default, 20 results per page are returned.

TODO

I'll leave it up to the Issues tab to track this.

Release History

0.0.3

various bug fixes
100% test coverage
documentation

0.0.2

various bug fixes

0.0.1

Initial release

WorldException/flask_sandboy