Usage

Decorators

Use the use_kwargs and marshal_with decorators on functions, methods, or classes to declare request parsing and response marshalling behavior, respectively.

import flask
from webargs import fields
from flask_apispec import use_kwargs, marshal_with

from .models import Pet
from .schemas import PetSchema

app = flask.Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/pets')
@use_kwargs({'species': fields.Str()})
@marshal_with(PetSchema(many=True))
def list_pets(**kwargs):
    return Pet.query.filter_by(**kwargs).all()

Decorators can also be applied to view classes, e.g. Flask’s MethodView or flask-restful’s Resource. For correct inheritance behavior, view classes should use the ResourceMeta meta-class; for convenience, flask-apispec provides MethodResource, which inherits from MethodView and uses the ResourceMeta and MethodViewType meta-classes.

from flask_apispec import MethodResource

@marshal_with(PetSchema)
class StoreResource(MethodResource):

    def get(self, pet_id):
        return Pet.query.filter_by(id=pet_id).one()

    @use_kwargs(PetSchema)
    def put(self, pet_id, **kwargs):
        pet = Pet.query.filter_by(id=pet_id).one()
        for key, value in kwargs.items():
            setattr(pet, key, value)
        session.add(pet)
        session.commit()
        return pet

    @marshal_with(None, code=204)
    def delete(self, pet_id):
        pet = Pet.query.filter_by(id=pet_id).one()
        session.delete(pet)
        session.commit()
        return None

Inheritance

Subclasses of view classes inherit both class and method decorators. Method decorators are inherited by method name. This makes it possible to add a new decorator in a subclass without repeating all existing decorators.

class PetResource(MethodResource):

    @use_kwargs({'species': fields.Str()})
    @marshal_with(PetSchema)
    def get(self, **kwargs):
        return Pet.query.filter_by(**kwargs).all()

class PetResourceExtended(PetResource):

    @use_kwargs({'indoor': fields.Bool()})
    def get(self, **kwargs):
        return super(PetResourceExtended, self)(**kwargs)

To allow subclasses to flexibly override parent settings, flask-apispec also provides the Ref helper. Using Ref looks up variables by name on the associated class at runtime. In this example, all methods in the PetResource view class serialize their outputs with PetSchema.

from flask_apispec import Ref

@marshal_with(Ref('schema'))
class BaseResource(MethodResource):

    schema = None

class PetResource(BaseResource):

    schema = PetSchema

    def get(self, pet_id):
        return Pet.query.filter_by(id=pet_id).one()

Swagger documentation

flask-apispec automatically generates Swagger 2.0 documentation for view functions and classes using apispec.

from flask_apispec import FlaskApiSpec

docs = FlaskApiSpec(app)

docs.register(list_pets)

app.add_url_rule('/stores', view_func=StoreResource.as_view('Store'))
docs.register(StoreResource)

By default, flask-apispec serves Swagger JSON at /swagger and Swagger UI at /swagger-ui. To override either URL, set the APISPEC_SWAGGER_URL and APISPEC_SWAGGER_UI_URL variables on the Flask application config, respectively. To disable serving either resource, set the corresponding configuration variable to None.

To add Swagger markup that is not currently supported by apispec, use the doc decorator:

@doc(description='a pet store', tags=['pets'])
class PetResource(MethodResource):
    pass