How To Build APIs With Flask - Python

23 December, 2022

Contributors

Aryan Tiwari

@technicave

Flask is a lightweight Python web framework that provides useful tools and features for creating web applications. One of the nice things about Flask is that it is very easy to set up and get started with. In this tutorial, we will walk through the process of creating a simple API using Flask and HTML.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure that you have the following tools installed on your machine:

Languages

Python

HTML

Microframeworks

Flask

Step 1: Set up a Flask project

To create a Flask project, you will need to create a new directory for your project and then create a main.py file within that directory. This will be the main entry point for your Flask application.

Next, you will need to install Flask. Open a terminal window and navigate to your project directory. Then, run the following command to install Flask:

Once Flask is installed, you can begin setting up your Flask project. In the main.py file, import Flask and create a new Flask app

Step 2: Define your API routes

Now that you have a Flask app set up, you can define your API routes. A route is a URL pattern that Flask will recognize and associate with a specific function.

To define a route, you will use the @app.route decorator. For example, the following code defines a route that responds to a GET request at the URL /hello:

You can also specify the HTTP method that the route should respond to. For example, the following route will only respond to POST requests:

Step 3: Create a HTML form

Now that you have your API routes defined, you can create an HTML form that will send requests to your API.

First, create a new HTML file within your project directory. Then, add the following code to create a simple form:

This form will submit a POST request to the /hello route that you defined in your Flask app.

Step 4: Run your app

To run your Flask app, open a terminal window and navigate to your project directory. Then, run the following command:

This will start the Flask development server, and you can view your app by visiting http://localhost:5000 in your web browser.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to create a simple API using Flask and HTML. You saw how to define API routes in your Flask app and how to create an HTML form that sends requests to your API. With these skills, you should be able to create more complex APIs and web applications using Flask and HTML.

python

api

html

web

flask

development