FastAPI from Scratch: Full Stack API and Web Application Development with Vue

FastAPI is a great web framework for creating web APIs with Python; It offers us multiple features with which it is possible to create modular, well-structured, scalable APIs with many options such as validations, formats, typing, among others.

When you install FastAPI, two very important modules are installed:

Pydantic that allows the creation of models for data validation.
Starlette, which is a lightweight ASGI tooltip, used to create asynchronous (or synchronous) web services in Python.
With these packages, we have the basics to create APIs, but we can easily extend a FastAPI project with other modules to provide the application with more features, such as the database, template engines, among others.

FastAPI is a high-performance, easy-to-learn, start-up framework; It is ideal for creating all kinds of sites that not only consist of APIs, but we can install a template manager to return complete web pages.

This book is mostly practical, we will learn the basics of FastAPI, knowing its main features based on a small application that we will extend chapter after chapter and whose content you can see below:

Chapter 1 - Required software and tools installation: We present some essential commands to develop in FastApi , we will prepare the environment and we will give an introduction to the framework .

Chapter 2 - Introduction to FastApi: One of the main factors in FastApi is the creation of resources for the API through functions, in this section we will deal with the basics of this, introducing routing between multiple files as well as the different options for the arguments and parameters of these routes.

Chapter 3 - Routing in FastApi: In this section, learn how to handle HTTP status codes from API methods and also handle errors/exceptions from API methods.

Chapter 4 - Errors and status codes: In this section we will see how to create sample data to use from the automatic documentation that FastAPI offers for each of the API methods.

Chapter 5 - Declare sample data: In this chapter we will see how to implement the upload of files, knowing the different existing variants in FastAPI.

Chapter 6 - File Upload: In this chapter we will see installing and using a template engine in Python, specifically Jinja, with which we can return responses in HTML format.

Chapter 7 - Database: In this chapter we will see installing and using a template engine in Python, specifically Jinja, with which we can return responses in HTML format.

Chapter 8 - Template in FastAPI: In this chapter we will learn how to use dependencies.

Chapter 9 - Dependencies: In this chapter we will learn how to use dependencies, which are the key element in FastAPI for its mediation and reuse, the repository pattern, and dependency types.

Chapter 10 - Middlewares: In this chapter we will see how to create a user module, to register users, login, generate access tokens and logout.

Chapter 11 - Authentication: In this chapter we will learn about some particularities and functionalities of FastAPI such as the use of annotations and the Ellipsis operator.

Chapter 12 - Annotations, Ellipsis (...) notation, and return types: In this chapter we will see how to implement unit tests.

Chapter 13 - Testing: In this chapter we will see how to implement unit tests in a FastAPI project using Pytest, and we will also discuss their importance.

Chapter 14 - WebSockets and Real Time: We talked about the use of WebSockets, what they are for, examples of use, single or multiple connection, and how to implement and consume them through an app in Vue, with authentication and Rest API

Chapter 15 - Deployement

Chapter 16 - General features

Chapter 17 - Key Extensions in FastAPI for Modern Development