Tutorial

Welcome to the pyresto tutorial. This tutorial will guide you through the development of a REST interface for the Github API. The implementation can be found in the Pyresto source repository in the pyresto.apis.github module.

The Base

Start off by creating a base model class for the service you are using which will hold the common values such as the API host, the common model representation using __repr__ etc:

class GitHubModel(Model):
    _url_base = 'https://api.github.com'

    def __repr__(self):
        if hasattr(self, '_links'):
            desc = self._links['self']
        elif hasattr(self, 'url'):
            desc = self.url
        else:
            desc = self._current_path

        return '<GitHub.{0} [{1}]>'.format(self.__class__.__name__, desc)

Simple Models

Then continue with implementing simple models which does not refer to any other model, such as the Comment model for GitHub:

class Comment(GitHubModel):
    _path = '/repos/{repo_name}/comments/{id}'
    _pk = ('repo_name', 'id')

Note that we didn’t define any attributes except for the mandatory _path and _pk attributes since pyresto automatically fills all attributes provided by the server response. This inhibits any possible efforts to implement client side verification though since the server already verifies all the requests made to it, and results in simpler code. This also makes the models “future-proof” and conforms to the best practices for “real” RESTful or Hypermedia APIs, which many recently started to use as a term instead of “real RESTful”.

Relations

After defining some “simple” models, you can start implementing models having relations with each other:

class Commit(GitHubModel):
    _path = '/repos/{repo_name}/commits/{sha}'
    _pk = ('repo_name', 'sha')
    comments = Many(Comment, '{self._current_path}/comments?per_page=100')

Note that we used the attribute name comments which will “shadow” any attribute named “comments” sent by the server as documented in Model, so be wise when you are choosing your relation names and use the ones provided by the service documentation if there are any.

Note that we used the Many relation here. We provided the model class itself, which will be the class of all the items in the collection and, the path to fetch the collection. We used commit.url in the path format where commit will be the commit instance we are bound to, or to be clear, the commit “resource” which we are trying to get the comments of.

Since we don’t expect many comments for a given commit, we used the default Many implementation which will result in a WrappedList instance that can be considered as a list. This will cause a chain of requests when this attribute is first accessed until all the comments are fetched and no “next” link can be extracted from the Link header. See Model._continuator for more info on this.

If we were expecting lots of items to be in the collection, or an unknown number of items in the collection, we could have used lazy=True like this:

class Repo(GitHubModel):
    _path = '/repos/{full_name}'
    _pk = 'full_name'
    commits = Many(Commit, '{self._current_path}/commits?per_page=100', lazy=True)
    comments = Many(Comment, '{self._current_path}/comments?per_page=100')
    tags = Many(Tag, '{self._current_path}/tags?per_page=100')
    branches = Many(Branch, '{self._current_path}/branches?per_page=100')
    keys = Many(Key, '{self._current_path}/keys?per_page=100')

Using lazy=True will result in a LazyList type of field on the model when accessed, which is basically a generator. So you can iterate over it but you cannot directly access a specific element by index or get the total length of the collection.

You can also use the Foreign relation to refer to other models:

class Tag(GitHubModel):
    _path = '/repos/{repo_name}/tags/{name}'
    _pk = ('repo_name', 'name')
    commit = Foreign(Commit, embedded=True)

When used in its simplest form, just like in the code above, this relation expects the primary key value for the model it is referencing, Commit here, to be provided by the server under the same name. So we expect from GitHub API to provide the commit sha, which is the primary key for Commit models, under the label commit when we fetch the data for a Tag. When this property is accessed, a simple Model.get call is made on the Commit model, which fetches all the data associated with the it and puts them into a newly created model instance.

Late Bindings

Since all relation types expect the class object itself for relations, it is not always possible to put all relation definitions inside the class definition. For those cases, you can simply late bind the relations as follows:

# Late bindings due to circular references
Commit.committer = Foreign(User, '__committer', embedded=True)
Commit.author = Foreign(User, '__author', embedded=True)
Repo.contributors = Many(User,
                         '{self._current_path}/contributors?per_page=100')
Repo.owner = Foreign(User, '__owner', embedded=True)
Repo.watcher_list = Many(User, '{self._current_path}/watchers?per_page=100')
User.follower_list = Many(User, '{self._current_path}/followers?per_page=100')
User.watched = Many(Repo, '{self._current_path}/watched?per_page=100')

Authentication

Most services require authentication even for only fetching data so providing means of authentication is essential. Define the possible authentication mechanisms for the service:

from ...auth import HTTPBasicAuth, AppQSAuth, AuthList, enable_auth
# Define authentication methods
auths = AuthList(basic=HTTPBasicAuth, app=AppQSAuth)

Make sure you use the provided authentication classes by requests.auth if they suit your needs. If you still need a custom authentication class, make sure you derive it from Auth.

After defining the authentication methods, create a module-global function that will set the default authentication method and credentials for all requests for convenience:

# Enable and publish global authentication
auth = enable_auth(auths, GitHubModel, 'app')

Above, we provide the list of methods/classes we have previously defined, the base class for our service since all other models inherit from that and will use the authentication defined on that, unless overridden. And we also set our default authentication mechanism to remove the burden from the shoulders of the users of our API library.