CRUD REST APIs in 5 Minutes Using Flask

Use Flask AppBuilder to develop CRUD REST APIs.

Overview

For Python, when it comes to API development, we have an abundance of choices. Popular ones are Django, Flask, and FastAPI, to name a few.

In this article, let’s use Flask to build RESTful APIs to create, read, update and delete (CRUD) records in a database table. Specifically, I will use Flask + Flask AppBuilder to build the APIs in 5 minutes.

Setup

Libraries

Let’s install the flask-appbuilder library. I also installpython-dotenv in order to use a .env file as my configuration file.

$ pip install flask-appbuilder python-dotenv

Using a virtualenv will be preferred. I assume you are already familiar with Python and will not go through the steps here. For me, I prefer to use Minconda to manage all my packages.

PostgreSQL

For this example, I am going to use PostgreSQL. The docker-compose file is shown below.

As part of the database setup, a database table called accounts is created.

CREATE TABLE accounts (
    userid SERIAL…