Making HTTP Requests from a FastAPI Application to an External API

FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.7+ based on standard Python type hints. It is designed to be easy to use, efficient, and reliable, making it a popular choice for developing RESTful APIs and web applications. Your FastAPI server may need to fetch data from other external APIs, to perform data aggregations and comparisons. So let’s learn how to send HTTP requests to an external API from a FastAPI application.

Sending HTTP Requests from FastAPI to External APIs

Create a file main.py with the following code:

Python3

from fastapi import FastAPI
app = FastAPI()

@app.get("/")
def root():
    return {'message': 'Welcome to GeeksforGeeks!'}

Make a request to an external API

Now we will call another API inside our FastAPI application. Currently, we are using a simple test API for demonstration purposes.

https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users

The data returned from the API looks like this:

external API call response

Calling an external API from our FastAPI server:

• Synchronous call
• Asynchronous call

Call external api from Web API Synchronously

If the API call is synchronous, it means that the code execution will block (or wait) for the API call to return before continuing. We will use the requests module in python, to make synchronous call to the external test API.

Open the terminal and use the following command to install the requests module.

pip install requests

Open the main.py file that we had created before. Here we will import the requests module.

import requests

Now we will make another endpoint: /get_firstuser . This will call the test API and synchronously return the name and username of the first user in the response. So our main.py file looks something like this.

Python3

from fastapi import FastAPI
import requests

app = FastAPI()

@app.get("/")
def root():
    return {'message': 'Welcome to GeeksforGeeks!'}

@app.get('/get_firstuser')
def first_user():
    api_url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users"
    all_users = requests.get(api_url).json()
    user1 = all_users[0]
    name = user1["name"]
    email = user1["email"]
    return {'name': name, "email": email}

Call external api from Web API Asynchronous

If the API call is asynchronous, the program doesn’t wait for the response. Instead, it continues executing other code while the API call is in progress. When the response is ready, the program will handle it. We will use httpx module in python to make the asynchronous API call.

Open the terminal and use the following command to install the httpx module.

pip install httpx

Open the main.py file that we had created before. Here we will import the httpx module.

import httpx

Now we will make another endpoint: /get_seconduser. This will asynchronously return the name and username of the second user in the response. So our main.py file looks something like this.

Python3

from fastapi import FastAPI
import requests
import httpx

app = FastAPI()


@app.get("/")
def root():
    return {'message': 'Welcome to GeeksforGeeks!'}


@app.get('/get_firstuser')
def first_user():
    api_url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users"
    all_users = requests.get(api_url).json()
    user1 = all_users[0]
    name = user1["name"]
    email = user1["email"]
    return {'name': name, "email": email}


@app.get('/get_seconduser')
async def second_user():
    api_url = "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users"
    async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
        response = await client.get(api_url)
        all_users = response.json()
        user2 = all_users[1]
        name = user2["name"]
        email = user2["email"]
        return {'name': name, "email": email}

Testing the API

Now open the terminal in your directory and run the server with the following command:

uvicorn main:app --reload

Now you can open the browser and call your API at http://localhost:8000. If you enter http://127.0.0.1:8000/get_firstuser, the FastAPI server makes a call to the external test API and returns the name and email of the first user as response.

FastAPI response for first user

If you enter http://127.0.0.1:8000/get_seconduser, you will be get the name and email of the second user as response.

FastAPI response for second user

You can also refer to this article, which explains the benefit of using asynchronous API calls instead of synchronous API calls.