Steps to Create a Simple Django REST API Project

In this Django API tutorial, we will create a simple API, which will accept the height (in feet) of a person and returns the ideal weight (in kgs) for that person to be.

Prerequisites

Install either Python or the Anacondas distribution of Python.

Install the Django and Django REST frameworks with below commands:

• pip install django
• pip install djangorestframework

For the Anacondas Python distribution, use the below commands:

• conda install django
• conda install -c conda-forge djangorestframework

Step 1: Navigate to any folder you want in order to create the django project, open the command prompt there and enter the following command:

django-admin startproject SampleProject

Step2: Navigate to the project folder and create a web app using the below command:

python manage.py startapp MyApp

The project folder will look something like this:

'rest_framework',
 'MyApp',

from django.shortcuts import render
from django.http import Http404
from rest_framework.views import APIView
from rest_framework.decorators import api_view
from rest_framework.response import Response
from rest_framework import status
from django.http import JsonResponse
from django.core import serializers
from django.conf import settings
import json

# Create your views here.

@api_view(["POST"])
def IdealWeight(heightdata):
    try:
        height=json.loads(heightdata.body)
        weight=str(height*10)

        return JsonResponse("Ideal weight should be:"+weight+" kg",safe=False)
    except ValueError as e:
        return Response(e.args[0],status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

from django.conf.urls import url
from django.contrib import admin
from MyApp import views

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^admin/', admin.site.urls),
    url(r'^idealweight/',views.IdealWeight)
]

The line url(r^idealweight/,views.IdealWeight) basically tells us that the IdealWeight method will be called using the url http://<server ip>/idealweight/

Step6: We can start the api with below commands in command prompt:

python manage.py runserver

Finally, we can test the API using POSTMAN.