Create your first REST API

The module provides helpers to build a REST API based on a function which computes predictions for a machine learning model. The following steps explains how to build a simple example.

Train a model

Let’s train and save a simple model based on Iris datasets.

<<<

import pickle
from sklearn import datasets
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression

iris = datasets.load_iris()
X = iris.data[:, :2]  # we only take the first two features.
y = iris.target
clf = LogisticRegression()
clf.fit(X, y)
with open("iris2.pickle", "wb") as f:
    pickle.dump(clf, f)

>>>

    

The model could be anything not from scikit-learn or any other machine learning library not even a model.

Implement your predict function

The following function must be stored in a local file. Let’s choose mymlrestapi.py.

<<<

import pickle

# We declare an id for the REST API.


def restapi_version():
    return "0.1.1234"

# We declare a loading function.


def restapi_load():
    with open("iris2.pickle", "rb") as f:
        loaded_model = pickle.load(f)
    return loaded_model

# We declare a predict function.


def restapi_predict(clf, X):
    return clf.predict_proba(X)


# We test it works.
if __name__ == "__main__":
    clf = restapi_load()
    print(restapi_predict(clf, [0.1, 0.2]))

>>>

    

Start the REST API server

We first run the server locally. The command line cmd_start_mlrestapi_cmd:

start_mlrestapi --name=dummyfct --options=mymlrestapi.py

Test the REST API

The final test consists in checking we can obtain the prediction by calling the server.

import requests
import ujson
features = ujson.dumps({'X': [0.1, 0.2]})
r = requests.post('http://127.0.0.1:8081', data=features)
print(r)
print(r.json())

REST API with authentification

To query the REST API with an authentified user:

import requests
import ujson
features = ujson.dumps({'X': [0.1, 0.2]})
r = requests.post('http://127.0.0.1:8081', data=features, protocol='https',
                  headers=dict(uid="user", token="password"))
print(r)
print(r.json())

The command line cmd_start_mlrestapi_cmd can launch the application which requires authentification:

start_mlrestapi --name=dummyfct --options=mymlrestapi.py --users=encrypted_passwords.txt

There is an first step which consists in encrypting the password with command cmd_encrypt4mlrestapi_cmd.

encrypt_pwd --input=users.txt --output=encrypted_passwords.txt