APISettings

Source module: fastapi_utils.api_settings

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The BaseSettings class provided as part of pydantic makes it very easy to load variables from the environment for use as part of application configuration.

This package provides a class called APISettings which makes it easy to set the most common configuration settings used with FastAPI through environment variables.

It also provides an lru_cache-decorated function for accessing a cached settings instance to ensure maximum performance if you want to access the settings in endpoint functions.

Even if you care about different settings in your own application, you can follow the patterns in fastapi_utils.api_settings to efficiently access environment-determined application configuration settings.

Settings provided by APISettings:

When initialized, APISettings reads the following environment variables into the specified attributes:

Environment Variable	Attribute Name	Type	Default Value
API_DEBUG	debug	bool	False
API_DOCS_URL	docs_url	str	"/docs
API_OPENAPI_PREFIX	openapi_prefix	str	""
API_OPENAPI_URL	openapi_url	str	"/openapi.json"
API_REDOC_URL	redoc_url	str	"/redoc"
API_TITLE	title	str	"FastAPI"
API_VERSION	version	str	"0.1.0"
API_DISABLE_DOCS	disable_docs	bool	False

APISettings also has a derived property fastapi_kwargs consisting of a dict with all of the attributes above except disable_docs.

(Note that each of the keys of fastapi_kwargs are keyword arguments for fastapi.FastAPI.__init__.)

If disable_docs is True, the values of docs_url, redoc_url, and openapi_url are all set to None in the fastapi_kwargs property value.

Using APISettings to configure a FastAPI instance

It is generally a good idea to initialize your FastAPI instance inside a function. This ensures that you never have access to a partially-configured instance of your app, and you can easily change settings and generate a new instance (for example during tests).

Here’s a simple example of what this might look like:

from fastapi import FastAPI

from fastapi_utils.api_settings import get_api_settings


def get_app() -> FastAPI:
    get_api_settings.cache_clear()
    settings = get_api_settings()
    app = FastAPI(**settings.fastapi_kwargs)
    # <Typically, you would include endpoint routers here>
    return app

The get_api_settings just returns an instance of APISettings, but it is decorated with lru_cache to ensure that the expensive operation of reading and parsing environment variables is only done once, even if you were to frequently access the settings in endpoint code.

However, we can make sure that settings are reloaded whenever the app is created by adding get_api_settings.cache_clear() to the app creation function, which resets the lru_cache:

from fastapi import FastAPI

from fastapi_utils.api_settings import get_api_settings


def get_app() -> FastAPI:
    get_api_settings.cache_clear()
    settings = get_api_settings()
    app = FastAPI(**settings.fastapi_kwargs)
    # <Typically, you would include endpoint routers here>
    return app

You can then reload (and cache) the environment settings by calling get_api_settings(), and can get environment-determined keyword arguments for FastAPI from api_settings.fastapi_kwargs:

from fastapi import FastAPI

from fastapi_utils.api_settings import get_api_settings


def get_app() -> FastAPI:
    get_api_settings.cache_clear()
    settings = get_api_settings()
    app = FastAPI(**settings.fastapi_kwargs)
    # <Typically, you would include endpoint routers here>
    return app

If none of the relevant environment variables are set, the resulting instance would have been initialized with the default keyword arguments of FastAPI.

But, for example, if the API_DISABLE_DOCS environment variable had the value "true", then the result of get_app() would be a FastAPI instance where docs_url, redoc_url, and openapi_url are all None (and the API docs are secure).

This might be useful if you want to enable docs during development, but hide your OpenAPI schema and disable the docs endpoints in production.