About FastAPI-Restly#

What it is#

FastAPI-Restly is a REST framework for resource-shaped APIs built with FastAPI and SQLAlchemy 2. The goal is to keep repeated API patterns in one place while staying close to the FastAPI and SQLAlchemy code you already write.

FastAPI deliberately handles one side of a web application: routing, validation, serialization, and dependency injection. Restly focuses on the resource layer around that: SQLAlchemy sessions, ORM-to-schema mapping, generated CRUD routes, query parameters, error translation, and test fixtures.

Philosophy#

  • DRY, but standard. Reuse should come from conventions on top of the stack you already know, not from a parallel abstraction that hides it. You can always drop one level down to plain FastAPI or SQLAlchemy.

  • Out of the box. The common path should not need wiring: engine and session setup, commit handling, schema generation, list filtering with strict validation, error translation, and savepoint-isolated test fixtures all work from fr.configure() onward.

  • Customization is never off the path. Applications are rarely just CRUD. Every generated operation has explicit override points so generated behavior is a starting point, not a boundary (see three tiers).

  • Documentation you don’t have to guess at. Common paths have runnable examples and extension points say where custom behavior belongs, for your team.

The core patterns (class-based views, the override hierarchy, and schema generation) are proven by four years of internal production use. The public API surface is still settling on the way to 1.0.0 (see the changelog); a broader user base will find corners we haven’t hit yet. If you find something broken or missing, open an issue.

History#

Restly is built and maintained by Rutger Prins, and the pattern behind it predates FastAPI. At EclecticIQ, an earlier private framework on Flask and Flask-Classy explored the same idea: define a model, define a schema, get a working API, override individual methods where needed. It was never released publicly.

When FastAPI and SQLAlchemy 2 matured, the approach was rebuilt as Restly at Clearblue Markets, which later allowed the work to be shared publicly, and then developed and refined in production at Brenntag. Those deployments (four years of internal use, plus the lessons of the earlier Flask framework) are what became the public project. We thank all three companies for the environments that made it possible.

Privacy#

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