Django Rest Framework includes a UI for interacting with your API. Here’s how to turn it off. This is a screenshot of the UI from the docs. It’s pretty cool! But, I don’t want it in production. Add this to your settings file to force JSON rendering in non-debug mode– Django-speak for production. # settings.py if not DEBUG: REST_FRAMEWORK["DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES"] = [ "rest_framework.renderers.JSONRenderer", ] This will render a JSON object instead of the UI.
Something I’ve taken a while to get under my fingers is Django’s URL routing conventions. Here’s a brief summary. At the root of your app or apps, you’ll find a file like this. # urls.py from django.urls import path from . import views urlpatterns = [ path("articles/2003/", views.special_case_2003), path("articles/<int:year>/", views.year_archive), path("articles/<int:year>/<int:month>/", views.month_archive), ] On a bigger app, these path calls might look like this: path("api/posts/", include(posts_urls.urlpatterns)), Which are include-ing from other nested urls.py. I think this convention is a little less direct than Rails’ giant routes.rb, but it also keeps the URLs in nice buckets with the rest of their supporting code.
SALT messages are encoded with a library called msgpack, the Python implementation of MessagePack. How can we read them? Here’s an example message I want to decode: £jid´20250602114126621578¦return£tcp§retcode�¢idABC-LAPTOP-02£funªconfig.get¨fun_args©transport We can do that with the same library: import msgpack with open('return.p', 'rb') as f: unp = msgpack.unpackb(f.read()) print(unp) Make sure you install msgpack: pip install msgpack This will print something we can read (newlines added by me): { 'jid': '20250602114126621578', 'return': 'tcp', 'retcode': 0, 'id': 'ABC-LAPTOP-02', 'fun': 'config.get', 'fun_args': ['transport'] }
Python string interpolation is available via few of interfaces, as Chris at Hashrocket taught me. Today I learned about formatted string literals, more commonly known as f-strings. >>> animals = 'cats' >>> print(f'My house is full of {animals}.') My house is full of cats. They’re my preferred technique because they’re similar to the interpolation syntax I’ve come to know in JavaScript, Ruby, and Elixir. F-String Docs
If I’ve defined a function in the Python REPL, I can read its definition with inspect.getsource. >>> def greet(name): print(f"Hello, {name}!") >>> import inspect >>> inspect.getsource(greet) 'def greet(name):\n print(f"Hello, {name}!")\n' And print it, too: >>> print(inspect.getsource(greet)) def greet(name): print(f"Hello, {name}!")
In the Python REPL, the help function provides a help message about its argument. >>> help(print) Help on built-in function print in module builtins: print(*args, sep=' ', end='\n', file=None, flush=False) Prints the values to a stream, or to sys.stdout by default. It’s a wrapper for pydoc.help. And it works on objects, too: >>> list = ["one", "two"] >>> help(list) Help on list object: class list(object) | list(iterable=(), /) | | Built-in mutable sequence. Learn more by reading help’s help: ...