Setting Up Your FastAPI Project for More Than Just CRUD Operations – Part 1

Welcome to the first part of our FastAPI Beyond CRUD tutorial series! In this series, we will explore how to build a more complex and fully-featured REST API using the FastAPI framework.

In this first part, we will start by introducing FastAPI and setting up our project. FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints. It is easy to use, extremely fast, and comes with features such as automatic API validation, OpenAPI and JSON Schema integration, dependency injection, and much more.

To get started, make sure you have Python 3.6 or higher installed on your machine. You can check your Python version by running the following command in your terminal:

python --version

If you don’t have Python installed, you can download it from the official Python website.

Now, let’s create a new directory for our project and navigate into it:

mkdir fastapi-beyond-crud
cd fastapi-beyond-crud

Next, we will create a new virtual environment to isolate our project dependencies:

python -m venv venv

Activate the virtual environment. On Windows:

venvScriptsactivate

On macOS and Linux:

source venv/bin/activate

Now that we have our virtual environment set up, we can install FastAPI and Uvicorn, which is a lightning-fast ASGI server:

pip install fastapi uvicorn

You can also install additional dependencies that we will use throughout the tutorial series:

pip install pydantic sqlalchemy alembic

Now, let’s create a new Python file to start building our FastAPI application. Create a new file named main.py in the project directory and open it in your favorite code editor:

touch main.py

Inside main.py, we will start by importing FastAPI and creating an instance of the FastAPI class:

from fastapi import FastAPI

app = FastAPI()

This creates a new FastAPI application instance that we can use to define the endpoints and their respective operations.

To run our FastAPI application, we will utilize Uvicorn. We can start our application by running the following command in the terminal:

uvicorn main:app --reload

This command tells Uvicorn to run our main.py file (which contains the FastAPI instance as app) with automatic reloading enabled. Now, if you navigate to http://localhost:8000 in your browser, you should see the FastAPI interactive API documentation (Swagger UI) where you can explore the API endpoints.

That’s it for the introduction and project setup in this part of the tutorial. In the next part, we will start defining endpoints and operations to create a more complex API. Stay tuned for more!