restless

A lightweight REST miniframework for Python.

Documentation is at http://restless.readthedocs.org/.

Works great with Django, Flask, Pyramid, Tornado & Itty, but should be useful for many other Python web frameworks. Based on the lessons learned from Tastypie & other REST libraries.

Features

• Small, fast codebase
• JSON output by default, but overridable
• RESTful
• Python 3.3+ (with shims to make broke-ass Python 2.6+ work)
• Flexible

Anti-Features

(Things that will never be added...)

• Automatic ORM integration
• Authorization (per-object or not)
• Extensive filtering options
• XML output (though you can implement your own)
• Metaclasses
• Mixins
• HATEOAS

Why?

Quite simply, I care about creating flexible & RESTFul APIs. In building Tastypie, I tried to create something extremely complete & comprehensive. The result was writing a lot of hook methods (for easy extensibility) & a lot of (perceived) bloat, as I tried to accommodate for everything people might want/need in a flexible/overridable manner.

But in reality, all I really ever personally want are the RESTful verbs, JSON serialization & the ability of override behavior.

This one is written for me, but maybe it's useful to you.

Manifesto

Rather than try to build something that automatically does the typically correct thing within each of the views, it's up to you to implement the bodies of various HTTP methods.

Example code:

# posts/api.py
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

from restless.dj import DjangoResource
from restless.preparers import FieldsPreparer

from posts.models import Post


class PostResource(DjangoResource):
    # Controls what data is included in the serialized output.
    preparer = FieldsPreparer(fields={
        'id': 'id',
        'title': 'title',
        'author': 'user.username',
        'body': 'content',
        'posted_on': 'posted_on',
    })

    # GET /
    def list(self):
        return Post.objects.all()

    # GET /pk/
    def detail(self, pk):
        return Post.objects.get(id=pk)

    # POST /
    def create(self):
        return Post.objects.create(
            title=self.data['title'],
            user=User.objects.get(username=self.data['author']),
            content=self.data['body']
        )

    # PUT /pk/
    def update(self, pk):
        try:
            post = Post.objects.get(id=pk)
        except Post.DoesNotExist:
            post = Post()

        post.title = self.data['title']
        post.user = User.objects.get(username=self.data['author'])
        post.content = self.data['body']
        post.save()
        return post

    # DELETE /pk/
    def delete(self, pk):
        Post.objects.get(id=pk).delete()

Hooking it up:

# api/urls.py
from django.conf.urls.default import url, patterns, include

from posts.api import PostResource

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # The usual suspects, then...

    url(r'^api/posts/', include(PostResource.urls())),
)

Licence

BSD

Running the Tests

Getting the tests running looks like:

$ virtualenv -p python3 env3
$ . env3/bin/activate
$ pip install -r test3_requirements.txt
$ export PYTHONPATH=`pwd`
$ py.test -s -v --cov=restless --cov-report=html tests

For Python 2:

$ virtualenv env2
$ . env2/bin/activate
$ pip install -r test2_requirements.txt
$ export PYTHONPATH=`pwd`
$ py.test -s -v --cov=restless --cov-report=html tests

Coverage is at about 94%, so please don't make it worse. :D