Essential Dependencies and Tools for FastAPI Development

Thanks to Sebastián Ramírez (@tiangolo), we have the FastAPI web framework, which makes developing applications a streamlined process. This is achieved through several key dependencies and useful tools. Let's overview them!

Dependencies

Starlette: A lightweight ASGI framework/toolkit perfect for building async web services in Python. It's the backbone of FastAPI's web capabilities.

Pydantic: The go-to data validation library for Python, ensuring your FastAPI applications handle data correctly.

Uvicorn: An asynchronous web server that runs FastAPI applications efficiently and quickly.

Concurrent tasks

asyncio: A library to write concurrent code using the async/await syntax. It is often a perfect fit for IO-bound and high-level structured network code.

FastAPI leverages Python's asyncio to enhance its performance and efficiency, especially when dealing with I/O-bound operations. This approach allows FastAPI to handle numerous tasks concurrently without blocking the main execution thread, making it one of the fastest Python web frameworks available.

Web Clients for Testing and Interaction

HTTPie: A user-friendly command-line HTTP client for testing, debugging, and?interacting with APIs and HTTP servers.

Requests: A simple, reliable HTTP library for Python that makes sending HTTP requests straightforward.

HTTPX: A fully-featured HTTP client for Python 3, offering both sync and async APIs, and support for HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.

Dependency Management

Poetry: A fantastic tool for dependency management and packaging in Python, making it easy to maintain your project's dependencies.

Pipenv: A great for managing virtual environments and dependencies, bridging gaps.

Testing Frameworks

Pytest: The framework makes writing small, readable tests a breeze and scales up to support complex functional testing for applications and libraries.

Unittest: The built-in unit testing framework for Python, is ideal for those who prefer sticking with standard libraries.

Code Quality and Formatting

Black: The uncompromising code formatter that keeps your Python code consistently styled.

Ruff: An extremely fast Python linter and code formatter, written in Rust.

Asynchronous Task Queue

Celery: A simple, flexible, and reliable distributed system to process large amounts of messages, acting as an asynchronous task queue or job queue.

ORM (Object Relational Mapper)

SQLAlchemy: The Python SQL toolkit and ORM that gives developers the full power and flexibility of SQL.

SQLModel: leverages both SQLAlchemy and Pydantic to provide ORM functionality for FastAPI, combining the best of both worlds. The Fast API author Sebastián Ramírez created it!

Deployment and Containerization

Docker: A software platform that lets you build, test, and deploy applications quickly using containers.

Kubernetes: automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, making it essential for modern cloud-native environments.

As for me, developing applications with FastAPI is significantly faster, easier and more efficient!

Read the FastAPI documentation, and my favourite book - FastAPI by Bill Lubanovic.