Full featured social media application - FastAPI

A complex project that can leverage your existing backend skills while challenging you to learn and implement FastAPI concepts. Here’s a breakdown of the features to be implemented:

Database Design

This project models and schema strickly follows what is on the database design file

Key Features

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• User Authentication:

  • User registration, login and logout
  • Password hashing and JWT token-based authentication.
  • Role-based access control.

• User profiles:

  • Create, update, and delete user profiles.
  • Profile pictures and cover photos.
  • Bio, contact information, and social links.

• Posts and Feeds:

  • Create, edit, and delete posts (text, images, videos).
  • Like, comment, and share functionality.
  • Real-time feed updates using WebSocket

• Followers and Following:

  • Follow/unfollow users.
  • Notifications for follows and follow-backs.
  • Display follower and following lists.

• Notifications:

  • In-app notifications for likes, comments, shares, and follows.
  • Real-time notification updates using SSE.
  • Notification settings and preferences.

• Messaging:

  • Real-time private messaging between users.
  • Group chats and chat rooms.
  • File sharing within chats (images, documents, etc.).

• Search and Discovery:

  • Search users, posts, hashtags, and keywords.
  • Trending topics and suggested users to follow.
  • Tagging users in posts and comments.

• Admin Panel:

  • User management (view, ban, unban users).
  • Content moderation (flagged posts, reported users).
  • Analytics and dashboard for site activity.

Requirements

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• Documentation & Testing:

  • Postman API documentation.
  • Comprehensive testing suite using pytest.

• Database design:

  • Use PostgreSQL database.
  • Design a robust schema to handle relationships and indexing.

• Caching:

  • Implement caching for frequently accessed data using Redis.
  • Use background tasks for cache invalidation.

• Deployment:

  • Use Docker for containerization.
  • Set up CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment.
  • Deploy the application on a cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) or any.

• Security:

  • Implement best security practices (CORS, CSRF protection, input validation).
  • Regular security audits and penetration testing.

• Error handling:

  • Endpoints should return the appropriate error responses and status codes
  • Errors should be properly handled to prevent server from crashing

Technologies to Learn and Use

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• FastAPI: Main framework for building the application.
• SQLAlchemy: ORM for database interactions.
• Alembic: Database migrations.
• Pydantic: Data validation and settings management.
• Docker: Containerization.
• Redis: Caching and background task management.
• Celery: Background task queue.
• WebSockets: Real-time features (2-way).
• SSE: Real-time features (1-way).
• pytest: Testing.

Achievement

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This project will challenge you to integrate various advanced features and best practices, providing a comprehensive learning experience in building complex backend systems with FastAPI.

Starting the project

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Follow the steps below to get the project up and running

cd fastapi-social-media-api/
copy .env.sample .env

At this point, you should update the values in the created .env file. Now, let's setup our environment

pip -m venv venv # create virtual environment
pip install -r requirements.txt # install dependencies

Everything should run successfully. Next is to setup our database.

# create postgresql database
CREATE DATABASE fastapi-social-media-api;

# let's make migrations to our database
alembic upgrade head

We are now set up. Now, let's start our project server

python3 main.py

Testing

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To run your tests using pytest, follow the steps below

pytest --disable-warnings -vv -s api/v1/tests