October 26, 2017 2 min to read

Flask RESTful API services Boilerplate with Swagger-UI

A minimal boilerplate for creating RESTful services using Flask, SQLAlchemy and Flask-RestPlus. This boilerplate has swagger-UI added to it for easy documentation of the endpoints. The boilerplate also has capabilities for adding a database engine to your API services with the help of SQLAlchemy.

What it includes?

capabilities of establishhing connection to any database using SQLAlchemy.
a service logger for logging all the events, warnings, errors, etc.
a placeholder for declaring all your constants.
a placeholder for all your declared database models.
entire codeset is config-driven.
hosting of swagger-UI for your RESTful API’s documentation.
hosting multiple namespaces in the routes.
a custom response generator for the payloads.

Setting up:

install all the requirements from requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements.txt
make necessary changes in config.ini
- add host address (default=”127.0.0.1”)
- add port address (default=5000)
- set a name for the flask restful service (default=”flask-minimal-boilerplate”)
- add the database url (default=”postgresql://scott:tiger@localhost/sample_db”)
create a directory called logs in the current working directory. This is where all your log fiels will be stored.

Directory structure:

├── src
│   ├── core
|   |   ├── db_connection.py
|   |   ├── models.py
│   ├── instance
|   |   ├── config.py
|   |   ├── flask_app.py
│   ├── misc
|   |   ├── constants.py
|   |   ├── db_misc_functions.py
|   |   ├── response_generator.py
|   |   ├── service_logger.py
│   ├── routes
|   |   ├── item_1
|   |   |   ├── item_1_route_1.py
|   |   ├── item_2
|   |   |   ├── item_2_route_1.py
│   ├── namespaces.py
├── config.ini
├── requirements.txt
├── run.py