fastapi-learn

A REST API for a simple social media app, built while learning backend development with FastAPI. Users can sign up, log in, create posts, and vote on posts.

Features

• User accounts with passwords hashed with bcrypt (passlib)
• JWT authentication: log in to get a token, then send it with every request
• Posts: create, read, update and delete (only the owner can edit or delete a post)
• Votes: like or unlike a post, with vote counts included when you fetch posts
• Search and pagination on posts (search, limit, skip)
• Database migrations with Alembic
• Docker setup with the API and PostgreSQL in separate containers
• Interactive API docs generated automatically by FastAPI

Tech stack

Part	Tool
Web framework	FastAPI
Database	PostgreSQL
ORM	SQLAlchemy
Migrations	Alembic
Validation	Pydantic
Auth	python-jose (JWT), passlib
Deployment	Docker, Docker Compose

API endpoints

Method	Endpoint	Description	Auth
POST	/users/	Create an account
GET	/users/{id}	Get a user
POST	/auth/login	Log in and get an access token
GET	/posts/	List your posts with vote counts	🔒
GET	/posts/{id}	Get one post with its vote count	🔒
POST	/posts/	Create a post	🔒
PUT	/posts/{id}	Update your post	🔒
DELETE	/posts/{id}	Delete your post	🔒
POST	/vote/	Vote (dir: 1) or remove your vote (dir: 0)	🔒

🔒 = needs the header Authorization: Bearer <token>

Running it

1. Create a .env file

DATABASE_HOSTNAME=postgres
DATABASE_PORT=5432
DATABASE_USERNAME=postgres
DATABASE_PASSWORD=postgres123
DATABASE_NAME=fastapi
SECRET_KEY=change-me-to-a-long-random-string
ALGORITHM=HS256
ACCESS_TOKEN_EXPIRE_MINUTES=30

Use DATABASE_HOSTNAME=localhost instead if you run the API without Docker.

2a. With Docker

docker compose up --build

2b. Without Docker

You need a running PostgreSQL database first.

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
alembic upgrade head
uvicorn app.main:app --reload

3. Try it

Open http://localhost:8000/docs to see every endpoint and test it in the browser.

Project structure

app/
├── main.py        # App setup, CORS, routers
├── config.py      # Settings loaded from .env
├── database.py    # Database connection
├── models.py      # SQLAlchemy tables: User, Post, Vote
├── schemas.py     # Pydantic request/response models
├── oauth2.py      # JWT creation and checking
├── utils.py       # Password hashing
└── routers/       # auth, user, post, vote
alembic/           # Database migrations