Using Python with FastAPI to handle form data

In this tutorial, we will be exploring how to work with form data using Python and FastAPI. FastAPI is a modern web framework for building APIs with Python, and it makes handling form data extremely easy.

To get started, you will need to have Python and FastAPI installed on your machine. You can install FastAPI using pip by running the following command:

pip install fastapi

Next, we will need to install the uvicorn ASGI server to run our FastAPI application. You can install it using pip by running the following command:

pip install uvicorn

Now that we have FastAPI installed, let’s create a new Python file called main.py and import the necessary libraries:

from fastapi import FastAPI, Form

Next, let’s create a new instance of the FastAPI class:

app = FastAPI()

Now let’s create a route that accepts form data:

@app.post("/submit_form")
async def submit_form(username: str = Form(...), password: str = Form(...)):
    return {"username": username, "password": password}

In the code snippet above, we have created a route /submit_form that accepts the form data username and password. The ... in the function signature indicates that the form data is required. If you want to make the form data optional, you can set a default value to None.

Now let’s run our FastAPI application using uvicorn:

uvicorn main:app --reload

You should see output similar to the following:

INFO: Uvicorn running on http://127.0.0.1:8000 (Press CTRL+C to quit)

Now you can open your web browser and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs to access the FastAPI interactive documentation. From there, you can try out the /submit_form endpoint by entering some form data and clicking the "Try it out" button.

That’s it! You have successfully created a FastAPI application that accepts form data. FastAPI makes it extremely easy to work with form data in Python, and I hope this tutorial has helped you get started with building APIs using FastAPI.