About FastAPI-Restly

What it is

FastAPI-Restly is a CRUD framework for FastAPI and SQLAlchemy 2. It generates standard REST endpoints from a model and schema definition, and gets out of the way when you need to go beyond the standard case.

The central idea is that the five CRUD operations — list, get, create, update, delete — follow the same structure in almost every API. Repeating that structure by hand doesn’t add value. FastAPI-Restly handles it, so the code you write is the code that makes your application different.

History

The pattern behind FastAPI-Restly is older than FastAPI itself.

Around 2016, I built the first version at EclecticIQ, on top of Flask and Flask-Classy. The same idea: define a model, define a schema, get a working API — and override individual methods when you need to. That version went into production and stayed there.

When FastAPI and SQLAlchemy 2 matured, the approach translated naturally. I rebuilt it from scratch at Clearblue Markets, who later allowed me to open-source it. That was version 1. A second version was developed and refined in production at Brenntag. That was version 2.

Version 0.5.0 is the first public beta. The project has production history — two prior private versions, across three companies, over nearly ten years of use — but the public API is new and intentionally remains pre-1.0 while broader usage shakes out the edges.

Honest about where we are

Production history at three companies is meaningful, but they were focused deployments. A broader user base will find corners we haven’t hit yet.

The core patterns — class-based views, the override hierarchy, schema generation — are proven. The public API surface is new. If you find something broken or missing, open an issue.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Clearblue Markets and Brenntag for allowing this work to be developed and eventually shared. Thanks to EclecticIQ for the original environment where this pattern was first put to the test.