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Flask-RESTful-HAL

Introduction

Flask-RESTful-HAL is an extension for Flask-RESTful. It adds support for building HAL APIs.

Installation

The latest version can be obtained from PyPI:

pip install flask-restful-hal

If you use Arch Linux or one of its derivatives, you can also install flask-restful-hal from the AUR:

yay -S python-flask-restful-hal

Usage

Flask-RESTful-HAL extends the Resource base class of Flask-RESTful. Instead of defining a get method, a data method must be implemented which returns the contents of the resource class. In addition the two optional methods embedded and links can be defined to describe which resources are embedded and linked to the current resource. All three methods can be defined as staticmethod if no data needs to be shared between the method invocations (see the section about data sharing for more information).

Example of a minimal resource class

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful_hal import Api, Resource

TODOS = {
    'todo1': {
        'task': 'build an API'
    },
    'todo2': {
        'task': '?????'
    },
    'todo3': {
        'task': 'profit!'
    },
}


class Todo(Resource):
    @staticmethod
    def data(todo):
        return TODOS[todo]


app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app)
api.add_resource(Todo, '/todos/<todo>')
app.run()

In this example, the only required method data is implemented and returns the requested todo entry as a Python dictionary. By default, this dictionary is parsed to a json string and returned in an HTTP response with content type application/hal+json. If the Python package json2html is installed, the client can request an HTML output as an alternative (by sending Accept: text/html).

When requesting the resource, the client may add the query string links=true to get linked resources. Since no links method is implemented, only the default self link will be included in the response.

Example of a resource class with embedded and linked resources

from flask import Flask
from flask_restful_hal import Api, Embedded, Link, Resource

TODOS = {
    'todo1': {
        'task': 'build an API'
    },
    'todo2': {
        'task': '?????'
    },
    'todo3': {
        'task': 'profit!'
    },
}


class Todo(Resource):
    @staticmethod
    def data(todo):
        return TODOS[todo]

    @staticmethod
    def links(todo):
        return Link('collection', '/todos')


class TodoList(Resource):
    @staticmethod
    def data():
        return {'size': len(TODOS)}

    @staticmethod
    def embedded():
        arguments_list = [(todo, ) for todo in sorted(TODOS.keys())]
        return Embedded('items', Todo, *arguments_list)

    @staticmethod
    def links():
        arguments_list = [('/todos/{}'.format(todo), {'title': todo}) for todo in sorted(TODOS.keys())]
        return Link('items', *arguments_list)


app = Flask(__name__)
api = Api(app)
api.add_resource(TodoList, '/todos')
api.add_resource(Todo, '/todos/<todo>')
app.run()
  1. Links can be added by returning one or multiple Link objects from a static links routine. The Link constructor takes a relationship (e.g. collection, up or item) and one or multiple link targets. Link targets can either be expressed as a string (href attribute) or as a tuple consisting of a href string and a dictionary with extra attributes. In the example title is used as an extra attribute.
  2. Embedded resources are expressed with one or multiple Embedded objects. Again, the first parameter is a relationship. The second parameter is the embedded resource class and the following parameters are tuples with constructor arguments for that class.

By default, no resources are embedded. Embedding resources can be requested with the query string embed=true which affects all resources recursively (embedded resources can embed resources as well). This behavior can be changed by specifying a concrete level of embedding (e.g. embed=2 would only embed two levels of resources).

Sharing data between methods

In most cases, the data, embedded and links methods need access to the same data source. In order to avoid accessing the data backend (for example a database) three times with similar queries you can define a forth pre_hal method which is called on every GET request before data, embedded or links are executed. In pre_hal you can access the data backend and cache the result in instance variables of the current resource object.

class TodoList(Resource):
    def pre_hal(self, embed, include_links, todo):
        self.todos = db.query(...)

    def data(self):
        return {'size': len(self.todos)}

    def embedded(self):
        arguments_list = [(todo, ) for todo in sorted(self.todos.keys())]
        return Embedded('items', Todo, *arguments_list)

    def links(self):
        arguments_list = [('/todos/{}'.format(todo), {'title': todo}) for todo in sorted(self.todos.keys())]
        return Link('items', *arguments_list)

Securing API endpoints

Flask-RESTful-HAL does not include any authorization mechanisms to secure your api endpoints. However, you can easily integrate available Flask extensions by overriding the Resource class. The following example uses Flask-JWT-Extended to secure GET requests with JSON Web Tokens. Tokens are generated by a special endpoint /auth_token that is secured with basic auth:

from flask import Flask, g, jsonify
from flask_httpauth import HTTPBasicAuth
from flask_jwt_extended import JWTManager, create_access_token, jwt_required
from flask_restful import Resource as RestResource
from flask_restful_hal import Api, Embedded, Link, Resource as HalResource

TODOS = {
    'todo1': {
        'task': 'build an API'
    },
    'todo2': {
        'task': '?????'
    },
    'todo3': {
        'task': 'profit!'
    },
}

http_basic_auth = HTTPBasicAuth()


@http_basic_auth.verify_password
def verify_password(username, password):
    g.username = username
    # TODO: implement some check here...
    return True


class SecuredHalResource(HalResource):
    @jwt_required
    def get(self, **kwargs):
        return super().get(**kwargs)


class AuthToken(RestResource):
    @http_basic_auth.login_required
    def get(self):
        auth_token = create_access_token(identity=g.username)
        return jsonify({'auth_token': auth_token})


class Todo(SecuredHalResource):
    @staticmethod
    def data(todo):
        return TODOS[todo]


app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['PROPAGATE_EXCEPTIONS'] = True  # must be set, otherwise jwt error handling won't work with flask-restful
app.config['JWT_SECRET_KEY'] = 'use your super secret key here!'
JWTManager(app)
api = Api(app)
api.add_resource(AuthToken, '/auth_token')
api.add_resource(Todo, '/todos/<todo>')
app.run()

Tokens requested with the /auth_token endpoint can then be used in the HTTP authorization header with the Bearer scheme to gain access to secured resources:

Authorization: Bearer <token>