Create a fast auto-documented, maintainable and easy-to-use Python API in 5 lines of code with FastAPI (part 1)

Perfect for (unexperienced) developers who just need a complete, working, fast and secure API

Building and using our API will be as easy as using this vending machine (image by Jenna Hamra on Pexels)

You have a great python program that you want to make available to the world. With FastAPI you can speedily create a superfast API that’ll allow you to make your Python code available for other users.

In this article we’re going to create an API in 5 lines of code. What? Five lines?! That’s right; FastAPI isn’t called FastAPI because it is many times faster than frameworks like Django or Flask; it’s also super easy and fast to set up.

After we’ve created our initial API we’ll expand it the next part(s), demonstrating all the necessary bits of knowledge you need to create a fully functional, superfast, production-ready API. Let’s code!

Introduction to FastAPI

Let’s first a really quick look at our framework. FastAPI is a modern, open-source, fast, and highly performant Python web framework used for building Web APIs. Applications running under Uvicorn rank as one of the fastest Python frameworks available, only below Starlette and Uvicorn themselves (wich are used internally by FastAPI)…