endpoints 0.8.11

Get an api up and running quickly

Quickest api builder in the west! Lovingly crafted for First Opinion.

1 Minute getting started

First, install endpoints:

$ pip install endpoints

Then create a controller file:

$ touch mycontroller.py

And add some controller classes:

# mycontroller.py

from endpoints import Controller

class Default(Controller):
    def GET(self):
        return "boom"

    def POST(self, **kwargs):
        return 'hello {}'.format(kwargs['name'])

class Foo(Controller):
    def GET(self):
        return "bang"

Set a couple environment variables for a simple python server:

$ export ENDPOINTS_PREFIX=mycontroller
$ export ENDPOINTS_SIMPLE_HOST=localhost:8000

Now create a server file:

$ touch myserver.py

And add the necessary code to run a simple server:

# myserver.py

import os

from endpoints.interface.simple import Server

s = Server()
s.serve_forever()

Start your server file:

$ python myserver.py

And make some requests:

$ curl "http://localhost:8000/"
boom
$ curl "http://localhost:8000/foo"
bang
$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"name": "world"}' "http://localhost:8000/"
hello world

Congratulations, you’ve created a webservice.

How does it work?

Endpoints translates requests to python modules without any configuration. It uses the convention:

METHOD /module/class/args?kwargs

To find the modules, you assign a base module (a prefix) that endpoints will use as a reference point to find the correct submodule using the path. This makes it easy to bundle your controllers into something like a controllers module. Some examples of how http requests would be interpretted:

GET / -> prefix.Default.GET()
GET /foo -> prefix.foo.Default.GET()
POST /foo/bar -> prefix.foo.Bar.POST()
GET /foo/bar/che -> prefix.foo.Bar.GET(che)
GET /foo/bar/che?baz=foo -> prefix.foo.Bar.GET(che, baz=foo)
POST /foo/bar/che with body: baz=foo -> prefix.foo.Bar.POST(che, baz=foo)

Requests are translated from the left bit to the right bit of the path (so for the path /foo/bar/che/baz, Endpoints would check for the foo module, then the foo.bar module, then the foo.bar.che module, etc. until it fails to find a valid module). Once the module is found, endpoints will then attempt to find the class with the remaining path bits. If no class is found, Default will be used.

Example

So, if you set up your site like this:

site/
  controllers/
    __init__.py

and the controllers.__init__.py contained:

from endpoints import Controller

class Default(Controller):
    def GET(self):
        return "called /"

class Foo(Controller):
    def GET(self):
        return "called /foo"

Then, your call requests would be translated like this:

GET / -> controllers.Default.GET()
GET /foo -> controllers.Foo.GET()

Handling path parameters and query vars

You can define your controller methods to accept certain path params and to accept query params:

class Foo(Controller):
  def GET(self, one, two=None, **params): pass
  def POST(self, **params): pass

your call requests would be translated like this:

GET /foo/one -> prefix.Foo.GET("one")
GET /foo/one?param1=val1&param2=val2 -> prefix.Foo.GET("one", param1="val1", param2="val2")
GET /foo -> 404, no one path param
GET /foo/one/two -> prefix.Foo.GET("one", "two")

Post requests are also merged with the **params on the controller method, with the POST params taking precedence:

POST /foo?param1=GET1&param2=GET2 body: param1=POST1&param3=val3 -> prefix.Foo.POST(param1="POST1", param2="GET2", param3="val3")

Fun with parameters

The endpoints.decorators module gives you some handy decorators to make parameter handling and error checking easier:

from endpoints import Controller
from endpoints.decorators import param

class Foo(Controller):
  @param('param1', default="some val")
  @param('param2', choices=['one', 'two'])
  def GET(self, **params): pass

For the most part, the param decorator tries to act like Python’s built-in argparse.add_argument() method.

There is also a get_param decorator when you just want to make sure a query param exists and don’t care about post params and a post_param when you only care about posted parameters. There is also a require_params decorator that is a quick way to just make sure certain parameters were passed in:

from endpoints import Controller
from endpoints.decorators import param

class Foo(Controller):
  @require_params('param1', 'param2', 'param3')
  def GET(self, **params): pass

That will make sure param1, param2, and param3 were all present in the **params dict.

Versioning requests

Endpoints has support for Accept header versioning, inspired by this series of blog posts.

If you are using versioning, then the prefix for each controller would be prefix.version. Let’s say you’ve set up your versioned site like this:

site/
  controllers/
    __init__.py
    v1/
      __init__.py
    v2/
      __init__.py

and controllers.v1.__init__.py contained:

from endpoints import Controller

class Default(Controller):
    def GET(self):
        return "called version 1 /"

class Foo(Controller):
    def GET(self):
        return "called version 1 /foo"

And controllers.v2.__init__.py contained:

from endpoints import Controller

class Default(Controller):
    def GET(self):
        return "called version 2 /"

class Foo(Controller):
    def GET(self):
        return "called version 2 /foo"

Then, your call requests would be translated like this:

GET / with Accept: */*;version=v1 -> controllers.v1.Default.GET()
GET /foo with Accept: */*;version=v1 -> controllers.v1.Foo.GET()

GET / with Accept: */*;version=v2 -> controllers.v2.Default.GET()
GET /foo with Accept: */*;version=v2 -> controllers.v2.Foo.GET()

CORS support

Endpoints has a CorsMixin you can add to your controllers to support CORS requests:

from endpoints import Controller, CorsMixin

class Default(Controller, CorsMixin):
    def GET(self):
        return "called / supports cors"

The CorsMixin will handle all the OPTION requests, and setting all the headers, so you don’t have to worry about them (unless you want to).

Yield support (experimental)

Want to defer some processing until after you have responded to the client? Then use yield in your controller:

class Foo(Controller):
    def POST(self, **kwargs):
        # let the client know you got the stuff
        yield {'success': True}

        # do some other stuff with the received input
        for k, v in kwargs:
            do_something(k, v)

Built in servers

Endpoints comes with Mongrel2 and Python Simple Server support, I got wsgi working also but we don’t use wsgi and so I haven’t added it to the repo yet since the code was messy.

Sample Mongrel2 script

import os

from endpoints.interface.mongrel2 import Server

os.environ['ENDPOINTS_MONGREL2_SUB'] = "tcp://127.0.0.1:9001"
os.environ['ENDPOINTS_MONGREL2_PUB'] = "tcp://127.0.0.1:9002"
os.environ['ENDPOINTS_PREFIX'] = 'mycontroller'

s = Server()
s.serve_forever()

todo, move our auth_basic, and auth_oauth decorators into a decorators sub module? Only problem I see with this is doing the actual authentication, so there needs to be a way for the module to call another method and return if it is valid, not sure how we would want to make that generic or if it is worth trying to make that generic. The other issue is we use decorators for all those decorators and I’m not sure I want to introduce a dependency.

Install

Use PIP

pip install endpoints

If you want the latest and greatest, you can also install from source:

pip install git+https://github.com/firstopinion/endpoints#egg=endpoints

To run tests

To run the tests, you’ll also need to install the testdata module:

pip install testdata

To run the tests:

python -m unittest endpoints_test

License

MIT