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Intro to the Back-end

Learn more about our back-end approach here.

Framework

⚒ Our back-end is built using the ⚡ FastAPI ⚡ framework.

We definitely would not have a fully functioning REST API (with documentation!) if it wasn't for FastAPI's tool and aim to speed up development.

  • OpenAPI standards enforced along with automatic Swagger documentation. This was an important feature for our front-end team to learn how to communicate with our API.
  • ORM support between database models and API response schemas. This is done through SQLALchemy (database API) and Pydantic (schema library).
  • FastAPI is ready for production! Unlike other python frameworks, FastAPI is easily ready for production with minimal changes. Uvicorn helps this process as it runs FastAPI on an ASGI server.

Deployment

📤 Our back-end is deployed using AWS EC2, along with an NGINX webserver.

  • AWS EC2 allows us to easily scale our website. It offers more control over how our app is served and has better pricing in the long-run.
  • NGINX is easier to learn than Apache as a college student with little background in XML syntax.

You can check out our REST API here.

We get most of our data by quering Yelp's GraphQL API.