Question

I’m planning an API for my own use, in Python. Perhaps someday I will make it freely accessible, but now I’m only planning to use it on my hobby site. At this stage I need some advice on how to set up the URLs, for files that receive both GET and POST requests.

Suppose one of my files is called function_A.py and used in this fashion:

www.example.com/api/function_A.py?a=something&k=other+thing

My question is, how does one set up ‘pretty’ URLs in an API, in the least resource-intensive way?

I see most APIs have a typical URL format like http://www.example.com/api/read instead of http://www.example.com/api/read.py

My options are probably limited to mod_rewrite v/s urls.py using Django – or is there another simpler option?

This is for the backend/API and I’d rather keep overhead to a minimum. I only want to handle 4 URLs in this fashion, and do not want to have a regex occur every time the URL is called.

Answer 1

The MYYN is correct. Using a framework such as Ruby on Rails or Django is the easiest way to create a RESTful API.

However, if you don’t want to use a framework, you can do the same thing using mod_rewrite in Apache. In fact, this is precisely what most frameworks/applications running on Apache do.

For example, WordPress uses an .htaccess file like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

This directs all requests to index.php, where they can be parsed and processed.

Frameworks like RoR or Django do practically the same thing: all requests are redirected to a single file/class/function.