Testing our first attempt at a Web API

Now we can start up a sample server that serves our snippets.

Quit out of the shell…

  1. quit()

…and start up Django's development server.

  1. python manage.py runserver
  3. Validating models...
  5. 0 errors found
  6. Django version 1.11, using settings 'tutorial.settings'
  7. Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
  8. Quit the server with CONTROL-C.

In another terminal window, we can test the server.

We can test our API using curl or httpie. Httpie is a user friendly http client that's written in Python. Let's install that.

You can install httpie using pip:

  1. pip install httpie

Finally, we can get a list of all of the snippets:

  1. http http://127.0.0.1:8000/snippets/
  3. HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  4. ...
  5. [
  6.   {
  7.     "id": 1,
  8.     "title": "",
  9.     "code": "foo = \"bar\"\n",
  10.     "linenos": false,
  11.     "language": "python",
  12.     "style": "friendly"
  13.   },
  14.   {
  15.     "id": 2,
  16.     "title": "",
  17.     "code": "print(\"hello, world\")\n",
  18.     "linenos": false,
  19.     "language": "python",
  20.     "style": "friendly"
  21.   }
  22. ]

Or we can get a particular snippet by referencing its id:

  1. http http://127.0.0.1:8000/snippets/2/
  3. HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  4. ...
  5. {
  6.   "id": 2,
  7.   "title": "",
  8.   "code": "print(\"hello, world\")\n",
  9.   "linenos": false,
  10.   "language": "python",
  11.   "style": "friendly"
  12. }

Similarly, you can have the same json displayed by visiting these URLs in a web browser.