For the basic usage introduction we will be wrapping a simple hello world function into an API.
Install using pip!
pip install symmetric
Once installed, you should be able to get the version number from the CLI:
symmetric --version
If you see something like symmetric version 3.4.2, then you are ready to use symmetric.
To start the development server, just run:
symmetric run <module>
Where <module> is your module name (in the examples, we will be writing in a file named example.py, so the module name will be just example). A Flask instance will be spawned immediately and can be reached at http://127.0.0.1:5000 by default. Do not use this in production. The Flask server is meant for development only. Instead, you can use any WSGI server to run the API. For example, to run the API using gunicorn, you just need to run gunicorn example:symmetric and a production ready server will be spawned.
Now let’s imagine that we have the following method:
def some_function():
"""Greets the world."""
return "Hello World!"
To transform that method into an API endpoint, all you need to do is add two lines:
from symmetric import symmetric
@symmetric.router("/sample", methods=["get"])
def some_function():
"""Greets the world."""
return "Hello World!"
The first line imports the symmetric object into the file and the second line transforms the function into an API endpoint reachable at /sample.
Run symmetric run example and send a GET request to http://127.0.0.1:5000/sample. You should get a Hello World! in response! (To try it with a browser, make sure to run the above command and click this link).
Crazy, right? That’s just the start of what symmetric can do, so keep on reading the documentation!