Scaffold django apis like a champion

Hey ✋ my name is Abdenasser I'm the creator of this little django scaffold generator https://github.com/Abdenasser/dr_scaffold and today I'm gonna show you how to use it to create ready to use and fully functional REST apis with django only using the command line, let's get started.

Setting a django environement is outside of the scope of this article, I'm sure there's a lot of guides and tutorials on how to do that all over internet you can follow one of them and get back, we'll be waiting just right here!

In a nutshell here is the tasks we gonna do through this article:

Create a django project
Setup djangorestframework and dr_scaffold
Scaffold a blog api with Articles and Authors
Enjoying 🎉

1. Create a django project:

Le't create a django project using this django-admin command:

$ django-admin startproject myApi

this command does the same as python manage.py startproject myApi

Let's then cd to our newly created django project cd myApi and create a virtualenv with:

$ python3 -m virtualenv env

Finally let's activate our virtual env with:

$ source env/bin/activate

2. Setup djangorestframework and dr_scaffold:

Let's install django rest framework and dr_scaffold packages using pip like the following:

$ pip install djangorestframework
$ pip install dr-scaffold

Next let's add these packages to our project INSTALLED_APPS inside myApi/settings.py like this:

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

Then let's add our core and api folders settings to myApi/settings.py, (for the simplicity of the tutorial we'll leave them empty):

CORE_FOLDER = ""  # you can leave them empty
API_FOLDER = ""   # or set them to be the same

3. Scaffold a blog api with Articles and Authors

Our blog api will be composed of two main resources an Article and a Author.

Let's scaffold our Author first:

$ python manage.py dr_scaffold blog Author name:charfield

🎉 Your RESTful Author api resource is ready 🎉

this command will generate a blog folder with models.py
admin.py views.py serializers.py urls.py all populated with appropriate code that your REST api needs for Author resource

Lets also generate the Article resource:

$ python manage.py dr_scaffold blog Post body:textfield author:foreignkey:Author

🎉 Your RESTful Post api resource is ready 🎉

this command will do the same thing but also will add a relation to our Author resource through a foreignkey field.

In order to generate the database tables let's add blog to our INSTALLED_APPS inside myApi/settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...,
    'rest_framework',
    'dr_scaffold',
    'blog'
]

Then let's run these commands to generate our migrations and migrate the database:

$ python manage.py makemigrations
$ python manage.py migrate

Finally add our blog to our project's urlpatterns inside myApi/urls.py:

urlpatterns = [
    ...,
    path("blog/", include("blog.urls")),
]

Don't forget to import include in your project's urls.py like so :

from django.conf.urls import include

Your urls.py should look something like this in the end:

from django.conf.urls import include #our added import
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path("blog/", include("blog.urls")), #our added bol path
]

Now run python manage.py runserver and head over to http://127.0.0.1:8000/blog/ to see your fully created REST blog API.. and also you can generate a super user with python manage.py createsuperuser then head over to http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin to check the admin panel.

Don't forget to star the repo on github If you like it.. Enjoy 🎉 !