Building a Production-Ready REST API with FastAPI and Docker: A Complete Guide

Ever wondered how to build a production-grade REST API that's secure, scalable, and properly containerized? In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk through creating a professional API using FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and Docker. We'll use a real-world example of integrating with Studio Ghibli's API to demonstrate enterprise-level patterns and practices.

What You’ll Learn

• Setting up a FastAPI project with proper structure
• Implementing secure authentication and authorization
• Creating maintainable database models with SQLModel
• Containerizing your application with Docker
• Configuring different environments (development/production)
• Writing comprehensive tests
• Deploying with proper security considerations

Project Overview

Source Code

The complete project code is available on GitHub. Feel free to explore, contribute, or use it as a reference for your own projects.

Current Implementation

Our project implements a production-ready REST API with:

• Role-based authentication and authorization
• Complete user management system
• Integration with external APIs
• Multi-environment support
• Containerized deployment
• Comprehensive testing suite

Professional Project Structure

Here's our production-grade project structure:

.
├── app/
│   ├── api/            # API endpoints and routes
│   │   ├── v1/
│   │   │   ├── auth.py
│   │   │   ├── ghibli.py
│   │   │   └── user.py
│   │   └── deps.py
│   ├── core/           # Core configurations
│   │   ├── config.py
│   │   ├── security.py
│   │   └── logging.py
│   ├── crud/           # Database operations
│   │   └── user.py
│   ├── models/         # Data models
│   │   └── user.py
│   └── services/       # Business logic
│       └── ghibli.py
├── containers/         # Docker configurations…