Python Flask API - Starter Kit and Project Layout

APIs changed the way we build applications, there are countless examples of APIs in the world, and many ways to structure or set up your APIs. Today we will discuss how I use Python and Flask to build and document REST APIs that scale to every need.
As usual, I’m providing sample applications, for this case a starter kit for everyone to use and build upon, here is the link to the final code we will review today.

#python #flask #api #starter #layout

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Python Flask API - Starter Kit and Project Layout

APIs changed the way we build applications, there are countless examples of APIs in the world, and many ways to structure or set up your APIs. Today we will discuss how I use Python and Flask to build and document REST APIs that scale to every need.
As usual, I’m providing sample applications, for this case a starter kit for everyone to use and build upon, here is the link to the final code we will review today.

#python #flask #api #starter #layout

42 Exciting Python Project Ideas & Topics for Beginners [2021]

Python Project Ideas

Python is one of the most popular programming languages currently. It looks like this trend is about to continue in 2021 and beyond. So, if you are a Python beginner, the best thing you can do is work on some real-time Python project ideas.

We, here at upGrad, believe in a practical approach as theoretical knowledge alone won’t be of help in a real-time work environment. In this article, we will be exploring some interesting Python project ideas which beginners can work on to put their Python knowledge to test. In this article, you will find 42 top python project ideas for beginners to get hands-on experience on Python

Moreover, project-based learning helps improve student knowledge. That’s why all of the upGrad courses cover case studies and assignments based on real-life problems. This technique is ideally for, but not limited to, beginners in programming skills.

But first, let’s address the more pertinent question that must be lurking in your mind:

#data science #python project #python project ideas #python project ideas for beginners #python project topics #python projects #python projects for beginners

Python Flask API - Starter Kit and Project Layout

APIs changed the way we build applications, there are countless examples of APIs in the world, and many ways to structure or set up your APIs. Today we will discuss how I use Python and Flask to build and document REST APIs that scale to every need.

As usual, I’m providing sample applications, for this case a starter kit for everyone to use and build upon, here is the link to the final code we will review today.

Before we start with code…

Let’s first discuss the project dependencies, why each of them is necessary and how it can benefit our project.

• flask: Flask is a micro web framework which has a minimal footprint compared to others like django, and allows us to select which components and modules we want to integrate with it. Flask is highly reliable and performant.
• flasgger: It’s a module that helps us integrate swagger docs to a flask API.
• flask-marshmallow: Object serializer, ideal for parsing and dumping JSON data in and out of our API.
• apispec: Required for the integration between marshmallow and flasgger.

Project Layout

We will start discussing how the project layout looks like by taking a look into the folder structure:

project/
    api/
        model/
            __init__.py
            welcome.py
        route/
            home.py
        schema/
            __init__.py
            welcome.py

    test/
        route/
            __init__.py
            test_home.py
        __init.py

    .gitignore
    app.py
    Pipfile
    Pipfile.lock

I think that the folder structure is self-explanatory, but let’s look at it part by part API Module

The API module will host our application code, from models, routes, schemas and controllers if needed (though I usually don’t create those).

• The models are the data descriptor of our application, in many cases related to the database model, for example when using sqlalchemy, though they can be any class which represents the structure of our data.
• The routes are the paths to our application (e.g. /api/home or /api/users) and it’s where we will define the route logic, data retrieval, insertion, updates, etc.
• The schemas are the views (serializers) for our data structures. We should have at least one schema per model. The schemas will have it’s own definition as we will see later.

#api #python #flask #programming #api development #software engineering

Creating REST API with Python and Flask: Web development with Python and flask part 6

Creating REST API with Python and Flask: Web development with Python and flask part 6

Leave a Comment / Flask, Python, Web Developemnt / By winston23 / May 7, 2021 / API, flask, REST API

Views: 265

An API, which stands for Application Programming Interface, is just what its name suggests it is. It’s an Interface for other application programs. Meaning it helps connect different programs and machines to access and share data. An interface is just a medium facilitating the access of certain functionality or an intermediary between two systems. In the post about REST here, we gave an example of connecting to a Facebook graph API to access Facebook user information to log in a user to a third-party application.

Get the code for this blog post from my github repository

REST ,an acronym for Representational State Transfer, is just a style guide for creating these APIs.We have a complete and indepth post here discussing what REST is, read it to have a clear understanding about that topic(REST) before continuing.

In this tutorial we will be looking at how we can create our own REST API in Python using flask micro-framework.

Table of Content

• A brief introduction to flask and its installation
• Why flask?
• Creating and connecting to sqlite3 database
• Creating our API endpoints
• Creating the **CRUD **operations functionality for our API
• Testing our endpoint with postman
• Conclusion

#flask #python #web developemnt #api #flask #rest api

Top 10 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Typical prevention mechanisms like Captchas and browser fingerprinting won’t work since APIs by design need to handle a very large number of API accesses even by a single customer. So where do you start? The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of a hacker and then instrument your APIs to detect and block common attacks along with unknown unknowns for zero-day exploits. Some of these are on the OWASP Security API list, but not all.

Insecure pagination and resource limits

Most APIs provide access to resources that are lists of entities such as /users or /widgets. A client such as a browser would typically filter and paginate through this list to limit the number items returned to a client like so:

First Call: GET /items?skip=0&take=10 
Second Call: GET /items?skip=10&take=10

However, if that entity has any PII or other information, then a hacker could scrape that endpoint to get a dump of all entities in your database. This could be most dangerous if those entities accidently exposed PII or other sensitive information, but could also be dangerous in providing competitors or others with adoption and usage stats for your business or provide scammers with a way to get large email lists. See how Venmo data was scraped

A naive protection mechanism would be to check the take count and throw an error if greater than 100 or 1000. The problem with this is two-fold:

1. For data APIs, legitimate customers may need to fetch and sync a large number of records such as via cron jobs. Artificially small pagination limits can force your API to be very chatty decreasing overall throughput. Max limits are to ensure memory and scalability requirements are met (and prevent certain DDoS attacks), not to guarantee security.
2. This offers zero protection to a hacker that writes a simple script that sleeps a random delay between repeated accesses.

skip = 0
while True:    response = requests.post('https://api.acmeinc.com/widgets?take=10&skip=' + skip),                      headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer' + ' ' + sys.argv[1]})    print("Fetched 10 items")    sleep(randint(100,1000))    skip += 10

How to secure against pagination attacks

To secure against pagination attacks, you should track how many items of a single resource are accessed within a certain time period for each user or API key rather than just at the request level. By tracking API resource access at the user level, you can block a user or API key once they hit a threshold such as “touched 1,000,000 items in a one hour period”. This is dependent on your API use case and can even be dependent on their subscription with you. Like a Captcha, this can slow down the speed that a hacker can exploit your API, like a Captcha if they have to create a new user account manually to create a new API key.

Insecure API key generation

Most APIs are protected by some sort of API key or JWT (JSON Web Token). This provides a natural way to track and protect your API as API security tools can detect abnormal API behavior and block access to an API key automatically. However, hackers will want to outsmart these mechanisms by generating and using a large pool of API keys from a large number of users just like a web hacker would use a large pool of IP addresses to circumvent DDoS protection.

How to secure against API key pools

The easiest way to secure against these types of attacks is by requiring a human to sign up for your service and generate API keys. Bot traffic can be prevented with things like Captcha and 2-Factor Authentication. Unless there is a legitimate business case, new users who sign up for your service should not have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Instead, only trusted customers should have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Go one step further and ensure any anomaly detection for abnormal behavior is done at the user and account level, not just for each API key.

Accidental key exposure

APIs are used in a way that increases the probability credentials are leaked:

1. APIs are expected to be accessed over indefinite time periods, which increases the probability that a hacker obtains a valid API key that’s not expired. You save that API key in a server environment variable and forget about it. This is a drastic contrast to a user logging into an interactive website where the session expires after a short duration.
2. The consumer of an API has direct access to the credentials such as when debugging via Postman or CURL. It only takes a single developer to accidently copy/pastes the CURL command containing the API key into a public forum like in GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow.
3. API keys are usually bearer tokens without requiring any other identifying information. APIs cannot leverage things like one-time use tokens or 2-factor authentication.

If a key is exposed due to user error, one may think you as the API provider has any blame. However, security is all about reducing surface area and risk. Treat your customer data as if it’s your own and help them by adding guards that prevent accidental key exposure.

How to prevent accidental key exposure

The easiest way to prevent key exposure is by leveraging two tokens rather than one. A refresh token is stored as an environment variable and can only be used to generate short lived access tokens. Unlike the refresh token, these short lived tokens can access the resources, but are time limited such as in hours or days.

The customer will store the refresh token with other API keys. Then your SDK will generate access tokens on SDK init or when the last access token expires. If a CURL command gets pasted into a GitHub issue, then a hacker would need to use it within hours reducing the attack vector (unless it was the actual refresh token which is low probability)

Exposure to DDoS attacks

APIs open up entirely new business models where customers can access your API platform programmatically. However, this can make DDoS protection tricky. Most DDoS protection is designed to absorb and reject a large number of requests from bad actors during DDoS attacks but still need to let the good ones through. This requires fingerprinting the HTTP requests to check against what looks like bot traffic. This is much harder for API products as all traffic looks like bot traffic and is not coming from a browser where things like cookies are present.

Stopping DDoS attacks

The magical part about APIs is almost every access requires an API Key. If a request doesn’t have an API key, you can automatically reject it which is lightweight on your servers (Ensure authentication is short circuited very early before later middleware like request JSON parsing). So then how do you handle authenticated requests? The easiest is to leverage rate limit counters for each API key such as to handle X requests per minute and reject those above the threshold with a 429 HTTP response. There are a variety of algorithms to do this such as leaky bucket and fixed window counters.

Incorrect server security

APIs are no different than web servers when it comes to good server hygiene. Data can be leaked due to misconfigured SSL certificate or allowing non-HTTPS traffic. For modern applications, there is very little reason to accept non-HTTPS requests, but a customer could mistakenly issue a non HTTP request from their application or CURL exposing the API key. APIs do not have the protection of a browser so things like HSTS or redirect to HTTPS offer no protection.

How to ensure proper SSL

Test your SSL implementation over at Qualys SSL Test or similar tool. You should also block all non-HTTP requests which can be done within your load balancer. You should also remove any HTTP headers scrub any error messages that leak implementation details. If your API is used only by your own apps or can only be accessed server-side, then review Authoritative guide to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for REST APIs

Incorrect caching headers

APIs provide access to dynamic data that’s scoped to each API key. Any caching implementation should have the ability to scope to an API key to prevent cross-pollution. Even if you don’t cache anything in your infrastructure, you could expose your customers to security holes. If a customer with a proxy server was using multiple API keys such as one for development and one for production, then they could see cross-pollinated data.

#api management #api security #api best practices #api providers #security analytics #api management policies #api access tokens #api access #api security risks #api access keys