Introduction

In the previous chapter, we were only storing our data in application memory. While it is easy to code that way, the data will be gone once the server restarts. That is obviously not ideal because we would expect the data to be persisted even after a server restart or application migration and suchlike. Therefore, in this chapter, we will talk about persisting data in a database. We will begin by installing the Postgres database on our local machine. Then, we will create a database using pgAdmin and interact with it using the ORM (Object Relational Mapping) package, SQLAlchemy. ORM allows us to interact with a database by means of an object instead of an SQL query. After that, we will define the user and recipe models, link them up, and use Flask-Migrate to create the corresponding tables in the database. Once that part is complete, we will go through exercises to understand the utilization of SQLAlchemy in the Python console. Lastly, we will add the resource for users so that new users can be created through an API.