That's right Digital Oceans Hacktoberfest is just about to kick off!

I'm going to give it a go and use it to motivate me to do some more work on the moodster API.

​I've made some real progress and the FastAPI version of the Moodster API is almost functionality equivalent to the previous version.

Wish me luck!

A while ago I began trying to dockerise the moodster API application and it was quite difficult to get started as the project was already under way and I wasn't that experienced with Docker at the time.

Since I'm re-writing the Moodster API I decided I should start off with dockerisation and bake it straight into my development process.

Fortunately the FastAPI documentation already comes with pre-built examples and docker containers for running FastAPI in Docker.

One of the main reasons I've been wanting to do this is that I've recently been looking into the 12 factor app. The 12 factor app is essentially a set of guidelines for how to develop applications that are to be ran as services.

The guidelines in place are to allow you to create services which are as maintainable and scalable as possible. The rule in particular that has driven me to do dockerisation of moodster is called Dev/Prod Parity. This essentially says that the development, staging and production environments should be as similar as possible.

In the Flask-Restplus version of the Moodster API I was using sqlite for development and then I was using PostgresSQL for the unit tests and eventually for deployment. This caused me issues from the off where I was hitting issues with differences between how Postgres and sqlite worked with SQLAlchemy and database migrations. It also made the configuration more confusing as I was having to override lots of things depending on dev vs testing. This is not ideal!

The dockerisation has gone fairly smoothly and I now use docker in development. This allows me to just use Postgres for all the environments and it's just another thing that I now don't have to worry about.

I did find that it slowed some development speed initially but now that I'm used to the docker commands a lot more it's no longer a barrier. Also the amount of time it is going to save me when it comes to deployment means it will be well worth it.

​Cheers

This is not something I normally do and to be quite honest in a work environment I wouldn't do this, but I've decided to re-create Moodster using FastAPI.

FastAPI is a small API focused web framework built on top of a few rather large projects:

• Starlette - An ASGI Web Framework
• Pydantic - Data validation using Type hints

There are a few reasons I've done this:

First of all Flask-Restplus was already giving me issues with data validation as mentioned in this post. They didn't seem to have a proper answer for the correct way to do this yet. On top of that I saw how clean it looked with pydantic to use type hints for data validation.

I have also been hearing about many different web frameworks that are now built with asyncio out of the box and thought it would be a good idea to future proof a little by choosing a framework that was capable of this. Realistically I'm not even going to use the async capabilities straight away as I don't think it's necessary for the scope of the project. It is certainly a plus knowing that it is there if I need to boost performance in that way.

Finally back in this blog post I said one of the reasons I didn't opt for a web framework that was ASGI was due to the lack of the ORM libraries not being async capable. Well the project that the starlette web framework is under also has libraries for async capable ORM's. This final piece put me at ease enough to make the switch.

There is a lot of work ahead essentially re-inventing functionality that already exists but it's also going to give me a chance to do things in a slightly better way as I've learnt quite a bit since starting out the Moodster API project.