respond

respond is a small, lightweight wrapper around Flask's make_response and jsonify, providing a fast and convenient way to return JSON data with the right HTTP status code.

respond utilizes the RFC HTTP status code descriptions as methods, you simply call a static method such as ok, not_found or internal_server_error and optionally pass in the data you wish to return as JSON.

🐍 Python v3.6 +

Installation

pip install respond

Usage

Import the JSONResponse class

from respond import JSONResponse

You can now call one of many staticmethods of the class

Return a 200 OK status code and a list

@app.route("/")
def example():
    """ Returns a list with an HTTP 200 OK status code """
    return JSONResponse.ok([1, 2, 3])

Return a 400 BAD REQUEST status code and a dict

@app.route("/")
def example():
    """ Returns a dict with an HTTP 400 BAD REQUEST status code """
    return JSONResponse.bad_request({"message": "You did something wrong"})

Return a 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR status code

@app.route("/")
def example():
    """ Returns an empty string with an HTTP 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR status code """
    return JSONResponse.bad_request()

Passing no data to the method returns an empty string

@app.route("/")
def ok():
    """ Return an empty HTTP 204 NO CONTENT response """
    return JSONResponse.no_content()

You can optionally pass in a headers dict if required

@app.route("/")
def example():
    """ Return a dict with custom headers """
    return JSONResponse.ok(data={"message": "ok"}, headers={"X-Custom-Header": "hello!"})

Taking a look in the Chrome developer tools, we can see our custom header:

Content-Length: 17
Date: Sun, 03 May 2020 16:49:41 GMT
Content-Type: application/json
Server: Werkzeug/1.0.1 Python/3.8.2
X-Custom-Header: hello!

respond has methods for all HTTP status codes defined by the ietf - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231

Common status codes include, 404 NOT FOUND, here being used in a Flask error handler

def handle_not_found_error(e):
    """ Handler for not found errors """
    app.logger.warning(e)
    return JSONResponse.not_found(data={"message": "Not found"})

app.register_error_handler(404, handle_not_found_error)

And 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR

@app.route("/internal-server-error")
def internal_server_error():
    msg = {"message": "Whoops, we did something wrong"}
    return JSONResponse.internal_server_error(msg)

Visiting this URL in the browser returns

{"message":"Whoops, we did something wrong"}

Methods available

100 range (informational)

200 range (success)

300 range (redirection)

400 range (client error)

500 range (server error)