APIs

You can build an API using any method you would in a full Django project, but nanodjango has built-in support for Django Ninja.

API decorator

The @app.api decorator is an instance of NinjaAPI which is automatically registered at the URL /api/. It is only registered if used.

This gives you an easy way to define your API endpoints:

class Item(app.ninja.Schema):
    foo: str
    bar: float

@app.api.get("/add")
def add(request, a: int, b: int):
    return {"result": a + b}

See the Django Ninja documentation for more details of how to use the NinjaAPI instance at @app.api.

See also

For CRUD examples, see:

• How to build a simple API service - a complete CRUD Todo API

Other Ninja features

The app.ninja attribute provides a convenient way to access additional Ninja features without importing, eg:

class Item(app.ninja.Schema):
    foo: str
    bar: float

@app.api.post('/do_something')
def do_something(
    request,
    item: Item,
    file: app.ninja.UploadedFile = app.ninja.File(..)
):
    ...

Why not import Ninja directly?

Although you can import Django Ninja directly, we currently recommend that you use the app.ninja attribute to avoid an issue with import order.

If you do want to import ninja, you need initialise nanodjango.Django first:

from nanodjango import Django
app = Django()

from ninja import NinjaAPI
api = NinjaAPI()

@api.get("/add")
def add(request):
    CountLog.objects.create()

app.route("api/", include=api.urls)

This is because the ninja module currently accesses Django settings when it is imported. This is normally not an issue in a full Django project, because the apps are loaded after settings, but in nanodjango everything is all in one file, where we configure Django with our call to app = Django(..). See Troubleshooting for more details.

Unfortunately this goes against PEP 8, and will lead to messy code if you use a code formatter like black or ruff - hence the app.ninja helper.

We hope this is only a temporary issue, but it will require a change in Django Ninja - see Ninja issue 1169 for details and progress.