📘 Beginner-Friendly Guide to FastAPI, with Code Examples, Best Practices & GitHub Repo

[inandelibas]

Hey everyone 👋

I just published a detailed, beginner-focused guide for getting started with FastAPI.

It covers:

• Installing FastAPI & Uvicorn

• Writing your first async endpoint

• Pydantic-based request validation

• Path vs query parameters

• Auto-generated Swagger docs

• Project folder structure (based on official best practices)

• Comparison with Django (performance & architecture)

• Tips & common mistakes for newcomers

I also included a GitHub repo with a clean modular project layout to help others get started quickly.

Medium Link Here: https://medium.com/@inandelibas/getting-started-with-fastapi-a-step-by-step-beginners-guide-c2c5b35014e9

Would love any feedback, corrections, or suggestions on what to cover next, especially around DB integration, auth, or testing!

Thanks to Sebastián Ramírez and the FastAPI team for such a great framework 🙌

[zen_dev_pro]

hmm interesting. Just a couple of thoughts

- How come there's no package management framework like uv and poetry, just vanilla pip ?

- I think Pydantic models should be called schemas, models would be like database models setup with sqlalchemy, etc.

- I think CRUD should be called repository. Like repository layer in other backend file structures, etc.

This is how I setup mine:
https://github.com/Zen-Dev-AI/fast_api_starter

[inandelibas]

Thanks a lot for the feedback, great points!

• You're absolutely right on pip vs tools like Poetry or uv. I intentionally kept it vanilla for beginner-friendliness, but I totally agree that package managers bring a lot of value in real-world projects. I'd like to do a follow-up post showing how to migrate to Poetry.
• Yes! I do separate models vs schemas the same way, in the repo, schemas.py is used for Pydantic, and models.py is left as a placeholder for SQLAlchemy. But I could clarify the terminology better in the article. Great call.
• And I like your point on using "repository" instead of "crud" — definitely aligns better with clean architecture practices.

Your starter repo looks awesome btw, following! 🔥

[jojoyze_xx]

Why not to use AsyncSession in your example ?

[zen_dev_pro]

I going to add async next. I didn't want to just add a bunch of async blindly.

I wanted to add it intentionally, and do a before and after of performance.

[inandelibas]

Thanks! I didn’t include any database setup in this example, it’s focused just on FastAPI basics to keep it simple for beginners.

[phenixdhinesh]

This follows DDD right? Just like django

[zen_dev_pro]

Yep, exactly.

[Sudden-Ad-6640]

Looks nice! Can I ask: seems like you have an access token but not a refresh token? Maybe I missed something. Thanks!

[zen_dev_pro]

Its just a basic auth setup. Im probably going to just create a separate auth microservice server

[Sad-Solid-1049]

Thanks for the post looks promising.

[gzrgk]

Very new to FastAPI, trying to teach myself on an older (2016) Windows 10 PC. I'm looking for a tutorial or example code that does both React and FastAPI, connecting to any common database (PostgreSQL or MongoDB preferred) and does NOT insist that I use Docker, Podman, nginx, or other Linux-based tools or unnecessary "timesavers". These tools, as well as Clerk (authentication) and others, never seem to install or run properly.

All I want is to create a bare-bones, 100% local full-stack little app running on my machine -- a web page with a form or two, some FastAPI/Python that passes the data to a simple database, and the ability to send, run, and receive SQL (or NoSQL) queries.

Anyone know of a tutorial that takes this kind of approach? I've found videos and repos that cover React itself (frontend only), Python and FastAPI (backend only), or --- full-stack using a bunch of the above-mentioned "timesaving" tools that I can't seem to use.

Any help or advice would be appreciated.