Introduction to Django Rest Framework

Django Rest Framework (DRF) is a powerful library for building web APIs. In this tutorial, we will create a simple RESTful API using DRF.

Step 1: Install Django Rest Framework

To start, install Django Rest Framework using pip:

pip install djangorestframework

Step 2: Add DRF to INSTALLED_APPS

Add 'rest_framework' to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    'rest_framework',
]

Step 3: Define the API Model

Define a model for the API in models.py:

from django.db import models

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    author = models.CharField(max_length=100)

Step 4: Create a Serializer

Create a serializer for the Book model in serializers.py:

from rest_framework import serializers
from .models import Book

class BookSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Book
        fields = ['id', 'title', 'author']

Step 5: Create API Views

Create API views in views.py:

from rest_framework import status
from rest_framework.response import Response
from rest_framework.views import APIView
from .serializers import BookSerializer
from .models import Book

class BookList(APIView):
    def get(self, request):
        books = Book.objects.all()
        serializer = BookSerializer(books, many=True)
        return Response(serializer.data)

Step 6: Add API URL Patterns

Add API URL patterns to urls.py:

from django.urls import path
from . import views

django.urls.path('books/', views.BookList.as_view())