Scaffolding Django APIs Like a Champion

Hey 👋 my name is Abdenasser I’m the creator of this little django APIs generator dr_scaffold and today I’m gonna show you how to use it to create fully functional REST APIs with django only using the command line, let’s get started.

Setting a django environement is outside of the scope of this article, I’m sure there’s a lot of guides and tutorials on how to do that all over internet you can follow one of them and get back, we’ll be waiting just right here!

In a nutshell here is the tasks we gonna do through this article:

1. Create a django project
2. Setup djangorestframework and dr_scaffold
3. Scaffold a blog api with Articles and Authors
4. Enjoying 🎉

1. Create a django project:

• Le’t create a django project using this django-admin command:

$ django-admin startproject myApi

• Let’s then cd to our newly created django project cd myApi and create a virtualenv with:

$ python3 -m virtualenv env

• Finally let’s activate our virtual env with:

$ source env/bin/activate

2. Setup djangorestframework and dr_scaffold:

• Let’s install django rest framework and dr_scaffold packages using pip like the following:

$ pip install djangorestframework
$ pip install dr-scaffold

• Next let’s add these packages to our project INSTALLED_APPS inside myApi/settings.py like this:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...,
    'rest_framework',
    'dr_scaffold'
]

Then let’s add our core and api folders settings to myApi/settings.py, (for the simplicity of the tutorial we’ll leave them empty):

CORE_FOLDER = ""  # you can leave them empty
API_FOLDER = ""   # or set them to be the same

3. Scaffold a blog api with Articles and Authors

Our blog api will be composed of two main resources an Article and a Author.

• Let’s scaffold our Author first:

$ python manage.py dr_scaffold blog Author name:charfield

🎉 Your RESTful Author api resource is ready 🎉

this command will generate a blog folder with models.py admin.py views.py serializers.py urls.py all populated with appropriate code that your REST api needs for Author resource

• Lets also generate the Article resource:

$ python manage.py dr_scaffold blog Post body:textfield author:foreignkey:Author

🎉 Your RESTful Post api resource is ready 🎉

this command will do the same thing but also will add a relation to our Author resource through a foreignkey field.

• In order to generate the database tables let’s add blog to our INSTALLED_APPS inside myApi/settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...,
    'rest_framework',
    'dr_scaffold',
    'blog'
]

• Then let’s run these commands to generate our migrations and migrate the database:

$ python manage.py makemigrations
$ python manage.py migrate

• Finally add our blog to our project’s urlpatterns inside myApi/urls.py:

urlpatterns = [
    ...,
    path("blog/", include("blog.urls")),
]

• Don’t forget to import include in your project’s urls.py like so :

from django.conf.urls import include

• Your urls.py should look something like this in the end:

from django.conf.urls import include #our added import
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path("blog/", include("blog.urls")), #our added bol path
]

• Now run python manage.py runserver and head over to http://127.0.0.1:8000/blog/ to see your fully created REST blog API.. and also you can generate a super user with python manage.py createsuperuser then head over to http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin to check the admin panel.

Don’t forget to star the repo on github If you like it.. Enjoy 🎉 !