What is CRUD in FastAPI?

CRUD refers to the basic operations that can be performed on data in a database. It stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete, and it represents the fundamental functionalities that are essential for managing data in most applications.

Create: It involves adding new data to the database. In FastAPI, we can create data by sending a POST request to the appropriate endpoint. For example, to add a new entry to the database, we would send a POST request to the creation endpoint with the relevant details in the request body.

Read: It involves retrieving existing data from the database. In FastAPI, we can perform Read operations using GET requests. For example, if we want to retrieve any entry from a database, we would send a GET request to the respective endpoint.

Update: It involves updating existing data in the database. In FastAPI we can perform an Update operation using PUT/PATCH, PUT allows us to update the entire database whereas PATCH allows us to modify specific fields in the database. For example, if we want to update any attribute of the user we would send a PUT/PATCH request to the endpoint with new details.

Delete: It involves deleting existing data from the database. In FastAPI we can perform a Delete Operation using DELETE requests. For example, if we want to delete any entry of a user we would send a DELETE request to the endpoint.

Requirements

To implement the CRUD operations in FastAPI we need the following :

• SQLAlchemy: SQLAlchemy is a popular SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper. It is written in Python and gives full power and flexibility of SQL to an application developer.
• Uvicorn: Uvicorn is an ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface) web server implementation for Python used to manually run our server. As FastAPI doesn’t have it’s own development server we use this high-performance and asyncio-friendly web server to run our API on localhost.
• SwaggerUI: SwaggerUI is an Open-Source tool to visualize or test RESTful APIs. It uses an existing JSON or YAML document and makes it interactive. It creates a platform that arranges each of our methods (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE) and categorizes our operations. Each method is expandable, and within them we can find a full list of parameters with their corresponding examples.

We will explore how to implement CRUD operations with FastAPI. CRUD operations are essential in any web application, including creating new records, retrieving existing records, updating existing records, and deleting records from a database.