Epilogue - ue22-p25-backend

A word about authentication¶

To authenticate with a REST API, you must provide proof of who you are with each request. This generally involves associating a token with the request that allows the application to know

Who we are
What we have the right to do on which resources

Authorization: Bearer <token>

Token acquisition is generally done via the Web interface of the targeted service.

⚠️ Attention a token should never be shared 💣️

In most cases a token is associated with:

A set of accessible resources
Rights on these resources (consultation, modification, creation, deletion)
A validity period (token expiration date)

A solution to preserve application tokens is to use a .env file

A usable API is a documented API¶

So to conclude on APIs, it is a very simple way to offer an interface to remote resources and data. The only difficulty in this area is the definition and especially the documentation of APIs 📑. So if you set up a Web service with an API and you want to open your service to the outside, please take the time to document your API.

Fortunately, FastAPI does all the heavy lifting for us (more on this later)

We find online plenty of open APIs a link to have a non-exhaustive list

https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis
ou
http://bit.ly/3YHC1qX
ou

notably an example of useful API
https://data.geopf.fr/geocodage/openapi

→ Illustration¶

Consider for example the case of a server generating lists of random numbers on demand. The API of such a server could be

/api/integer returns a random integer
/api/float returns a random floating number
/api/integer?n=100 returns 100 random integers
...

it happens in the python/api-random folder of the course

For example¶

Here’s how to generate some statistics on Github directly in Markdown

![Basile's GitHub stats](https://github-readme-stats.vercel.app/api?username=basileMarchand&count_private=true&show_icons=true&theme=dark)
![Basile's top languages](https://github-readme-stats.vercel.app/api/top-langs/?username=basileMarchand&hide=jupyter%20notebook&langs_count=10&theme=dark&layout=compact)

A word about “No Code”¶

For a few years increasingly fashionable: No Code, Low Code

mail support request that causes a new entry in a database
and a mail notification if “urgent” in the mail subject 🤯

warning¶

Application 1¶

I have set up a minimalist server offering an API allowing:

List all users in the database
Update your status
Send a message to a user
Retrieve messages that were sent to me.

🚀 https://mines.bmarchand.fr/api/doc 🚀

The idea is that you perform the following actions:

Using a Python 🐍 program:
1. make a GET request to find what your user ID is
2. make a PATCH request to update your status
3. make GET/POST requests to send messages between you
For the more playful, using the HTML/CSS/JS combo
1. Make the web client of this server 🤗!

Application 2: using the Notion API¶

The objective here is to set up a Python program allowing to modify the content of a Notion database. A skeleton is available here. The application in the end must be able to: