Build Your First API in 5 Minutes with FastAPI and Replit | Beginner Tutorial

If you’re looking to build your first API quickly and easily, FastAPI and Replit are the perfect tools for the job! In this beginner tutorial, we’ll walk you through the process of setting up a FastAPI project on Replit and creating your first API endpoint.

Step 1: Set Up Your FastAPI Project

First, create a new Replit project and select “Python” as the language. Then, install FastAPI and Uvicorn by adding the following lines to your requirements.txt file:

    fastapi
    uvicorn
  

Step 2: Create Your First API Endpoint

Next, create a new Python file (e.g. main.py) and add the following code to define a basic API endpoint:

    from fastapi import FastAPI

    app = FastAPI()

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

Step 3: Run Your API

To run your API, simply use Uvicorn to start the server by running the following command in the Replit terminal:

    uvicorn main:app --reload
  

Once the server is up and running, you can access your API at the provided URL (e.g. https://your-replit-project-name.your-replit-username.repl.co) and see the response returned by your API endpoint.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve successfully built your first API in just 5 minutes using FastAPI and Replit. Now that you have the basics down, you can start expanding your API by adding new endpoints, integrating with databases, and more. Happy coding!