apyclient 0.3.1

A Python Api Client

A Python API Client

Overview

Allows you to easily create client APIs in a highly customizable way.

Installation

Requires python >= 2.6 and apysigner. Tests require ‘mock’ package.

pip install apyclient

Usage

You are able to easily create a client Api class. The only requirement of the API class is that it must have a “HOST_NAME” attribute declared. The API uses this host name to prepend to the endpoint when building the request.

class MyAPIClient(object):
    HOST_NAME = "http://www.example.com"

    @api_request("/api-endpoint/")
    def fetch_some_stuff(some_var):
        return {"the_variable": some_var}

my_client = MyApiClient()
my_client.fetch_some_stuff(3)

And that’s it. The client will make an HTTP GET request by default with the data provided by the decorated method.

You can also do a POST request by declaring method="POST" in the api_request.

@api_request("/api-endpoint/", method="POST")
def fetch_some_stuff(some_var):
    return {"the_variable": some_var}

And finally, you are able to return a custom response class if you so desire. Just either provide a RESPONSE_CLASS on the api client class, or a response_class on the api_request decorator. If you have a custom response class declared both on the API client and on the api_request decorator, the decorator will win because it is more specific. The response class must take one argument on initialization, the original response.

class MyApiClient(object):
    HOST_NAME = "http://www.example.com/api
    RESPONSE_CLASS = MyDefaultResponseClass

    @api_request("/api-endpoint/")
    def fetch_some_stuff(some_var):
        return {"the_variable": some_var}

    @api_request("/api-endpoint/", response_class=SpecializedResponseClass)
    def fetch_some_stuff(some_var):
        return {"the_variable": some_var}

New addition: Signed Requests This was modeled after Google Maps signed request. When you have a situation where you want to secure an endpoint without login you can use the signed request.

The concept is the API provider shares a client id and private key with the client applications. The client applications then “sign” their requests to the provider using the client id and private key. When the provider receives the request, it verifies that it can create the same signature using the given client id.

Take a look at the django-request-signer python package for some more information.