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