Finch: RESTful API consumer

Finch is an asynchronous RESTful API consumer for Python. Finch is focused on remove all of the boilerplate related to consuming http based APIs and provide a high level abstraction to develop API clients. Finch is released under the Apache 2 license, so you can fork, contribute and also report errors and suggestions to improve it.

Usage

To start consuming a REST API you first should define the resources you are going to consume. For resources modeling we use the booby data modeling library. So, for example, to get your repos from github.com you should define the Repo model and the Repos collection.

from booby import Model, fields
from finch import Collection

class Repo(Model):
    id = fields.Integer()
    name = fields.String()
    owner = fields.String()
    is_private = fields.Boolean()

    def decode(self, response):
        return parse_repo(json.loads(response.body))

    def __repr__(self):
        return 'Repo({}/{})'.format(self.owner, self.name)

class Repos(Collection):
    model = Repo

    def __init__(self, username, *args, **kwargs):
        self.username = username

        super(Repos, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

    @property
    def url(self):
        return 'https://api.github.com/users/{}/repos'.format(self.username)

    def decode(self, response):
        return [parse_repo(r) for r in json.loads(response.body)]


def parse_repo(raw):
    return {
        'id': raw['id'],
        'name': raw['name'],
        'owner': raw['owner']['login'],
        'is_private': raw['private']
    }

Now you can fetch your public repos (and also your private repos if you're authenticated).

from tornado import httpclient, ioloop

def on_repos(repos, error):
    ioloop.IOLoop.instance().stop()

    if error:
        raise error

    for repo in repos:
        print repo

repos = Repos('jaimegildesagredo', httpclient.AsyncHTTPClient())
repos.all(on_repos)

ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

Installation

You can install the last stable release of Finch from PyPI using pip or easy_install.

$ pip install finch

Also you can install the latest sources from Github.

$ pip install -e git+git://github.com/jaimegildesagredo/finch.git#egg=finch

Tests

To run the Finch tests suite you should install the test requirements and run nosetests.

$ pip install -r test-requirements.txt
$ nosetests tests/unit

Status

Finch is under active development and there is not a complete documentation yet. By the moment you can read the examples in this repository and read the tests, that are the most up to date documentation. Also I'm working on create a complete API client using Finch and create a good documentation.