Build Your Own Flask API

In this example python script I start by building the basic framework below for our Flask Application.

from flask import Flask, request, jsonify

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def home():
    return  "Home"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True)

By running this code, you will see similar debug info in your terminal:

 * Serving Flask app 'main'
 * Debug mode: on
WARNING: This is a development server. Do not use it in a production deployment. Use a production WSGI server instead.
 * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000
Press CTRL+C to quit
 * Restarting with stat
 * Debugger is active!
 * Debugger PIN: 740-075-329

The decorator above the home() function indicates that this function occurs when navigating to root in your web browser.

Using the same path in Postman shows simply the text string that we returned.

I created an additional function called get_movie() with the following decorator.

@app.route("/get-movie/<movie_title>")
def get_movie(movie_title):

    url = f"https://yts.mx/browse-movies/{movie_title}/all/all/0/latest/0/all"
    r = requests.get(url=url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'html.parser')
    responses = get_page_links(soup)
    print(type(responses))
    status_code = 200
    # check to make sure something was returned
    if responses == {}:
        status_code = 204

    return responses, status_code

'<movie_title>' indicates a user defined string.

Here is the response in Postman.