Use pydantic with Django REST framework

• Introduction
• Installation
• Usage
  • General
  • Existing Models
  • Nested Models
• Roadmap

Introduction

Pydantic is a Python library used to perform data serialization and validation.

Django REST framework is a framework built on top of Django which allows writing REST APIs.

If like me you develop DRF APIs and you like pydantic , drf-pydantic is for you 😍.

Installation

pip install drf-pydantic

Usage

General

Use drf_pydantic.BaseModel instead of pydantic.BaseModel when creating your models:

from drf_pydantic import BaseModel

class MyModel(BaseModel):
  name: str
  addresses: list[str]

Whenever you need a DRF serializer you can get it from the model like this:

MyModel.drf_serializer

ℹ️ INFO
Models created using drf_pydantic are fully idenditcal to those created by pydantic. The only change is the addition of the drf_serializer attribute during class creation (not instance).

Existing Models

If you have an existing code base and you would like to use the drf_serializer attribute to only specific models, then great news 🥳 - you can easily extend your existign pydantic models by adding drf_pydantic.BaseModel to the list of parent classes.

Your existing pydantic models:

from pydantic import BaseModel

class Pet(BaseModel):
  name: str

class Dog(Pet):
  breed: str

Update your Dog model and get serializer via the drf_serializer:

from drf_pydantic import BaseModel as DRFBaseModel
from pydantic import BaseModel

class Pet(BaseModel):
  name: str

class Dog(DRFBaseModel, Pet):
  breed: str

Dog.drf_serializer

⚠️ ATTENTION
Inheritance order is important: drf_pydantic.BaseModel must always go before the pydantic.BaseModel class.

Nested Models

If you have nested models and you want to generate serializer only from one of them, you don't have to update all models - only update the model you need, drf_pydantic will generate serializers for all normal nested pydantic models for free 🐱‍👤.

from drf_pydantic import BaseModel as DRFBaseModel
from pydantic import BaseModel

class Apartment(BaseModel):
  floor: int
  tenant: str

class Building(BaseModel):
  address: str
  aparments: list[Apartment]

class Block(DRFBaseModel):
  buildings: list[Buildind]

Block.drf_serializer

Roadmap

• Add ENUM support
• Add option to create custom serializer for complex models
• Add support for constraints (max, min, regex, etc.)