http-apis / hydrus

REST server - Flask Hydra-powered for Semantic Web

hydrus

hydrus is a set of Python based tools for easier and efficient creation of Hypermedia driven REST-APIs. hydrus utilises the power of Linked Data to create a powerful REST APIs to serve data. hydrus uses the Hydra(W3C) standard for creation and documentation of it's APIs.

Start-up the demo

• with Docker and docker-compose installed, run docker-compose up --build
• open the browser at http://localhost:8080/api/vocab

You should be displaying the example API as served by the server.

Add your own Hydra documentation file

To serve your own Hydra-RDF documentation file:

• create a doc.py file as the ones in examples/ directory containing your own ApiDoc
• set the APIDOC_REL_PATH variable in docker-compose.yml. This should the relative path from the project root
• start-up the demo as above.

You should be displaying your API as served by the server.

Table of contents

• Features
• Requirements
• Demo
• Usage

Features

hydrus supports the following features:

• A client that can understand Hydra vocabulary and interacts with a Hydra supporting server to basic CRUD operations on data.
• A generic server that can serve required data and metadata(in the form of API documentation) to a client over HTTP.
• A middleware that allows users to use the client to interact with the server using Natural Language which is processed machine consumable language. (under development)

Requirements

The system is built over the following standards and tools:

• Flask a Python based micro-framework for handling server requests and responses.
• JSON-LD as the preferred data format.
• Hydra as the API standard.
• SQLAlchemy as the backend database connector for storage and related operations.

Apart from this, there are also various Python packages that hydrus uses. Using python setup.py install installs all the required dependencies.

NOTE: You'll need to use python3 not python2. Hydrus does not support python < 3.6

Demo

To run a demo for hydrus using the sample API, just do the following:

1. Clone hydrus:

git clone https://github.com/HTTP-APIs/hydrus
cd hydrus

2. Install a Python virtual environment using:

python3.8 -m venv .venv

or:

virtualenv -p python3.8 .venv

3. Install hydrus using:

source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py install

NOTE: there is an alternative way to install dependencies with poetry:

pip3 install poetry
poetry install

This is mostly used to check dependencies conflicts among packages and to release to PyPi.

After installation is successful, to run the server:

hydrus serve

The demo should be up and running on http://localhost:8080/serverapi/.

Usage

For more info, head to the Usage section of the wiki.

Development

1. Install git hook: pre-commit install
2. Every time code is committed, automated checks are run using mypy and pylint