How to Build a Simple API Using Flask

Introduction

In this tutorial, we will be looking at how to build a simple API using Flask. To demonstrate we will build a simple password generator where you will add the password length to the end of the URL and a password will be generated according to the given length. For this project, we will be using Flask as our basic web server, flask-restful as our API module .

Install modules

To install the above modules run the commands below on your terminal as shown below.

pip3 install Flask 

pip3  install flask-restful

Create app

After installing the above modules create a folder and call it flask-restapi and create a file called app.py. Inside the file import the following modules as shown below.

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful import Resource, Api
import random
import string

Next, let’s initialize our Flask application and the API as shown below.

app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app)

Now let’s create a class that generates the password and passes it to the API.

class GeneratePassword(Resource):
    def get(self, length=8):
        password = ''.join(random.choices(string.ascii_letters + string.digits, k=length))
        return {'password': password}

api.add_resource(GeneratePassword, '/password', '/password/<int:length>')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)