Delete Data with FastAPI¶

Let's now add a path operation to delete a hero.

This is quite straightforward.

Delete Path Operation¶

Because we want to delete data, we use an HTTP DELETE operation.

We get a hero_id from the path parameter and verify if it exists, just as we did when reading a single hero or when updating it, possibly raising an error with a 404 response.

And if we actually find a hero, we just delete it with the session.

Python 3.10+

# Code above omitted 

def delete_hero(hero_id: int):
    with Session(engine) as session:
        hero = session.get(Hero, hero_id)
        if not hero:
            raise HTTPException(status_code=404, detail="Hero not found")
        session.delete(hero)
        session.commit()
        return {"ok": True}

Full file preview

Python 3.10+

from fastapi import FastAPI, HTTPException, Query
from sqlmodel import Field, Session, SQLModel, create_engine, select


class HeroBase(SQLModel):
    name: str = Field(index=True)
    secret_name: str
    age: int | None = Field(default=None, index=True)


class Hero(HeroBase, table=True):
    id: int | None = Field(default=None, primary_key=True)


class HeroCreate(HeroBase):
    pass


class HeroPublic(HeroBase):
    id: int


class HeroUpdate(SQLModel):
    name: str | None = None
    secret_name: str | None = None
    age: int | None = None


sqlite_file_name = "database.db"
sqlite_url = f"sqlite:///{sqlite_file_name}"

connect_args = {"check_same_thread": False}
engine = create_engine(sqlite_url, echo=True, connect_args=connect_args)


def create_db_and_tables():
    SQLModel.metadata.create_all(engine)


app = FastAPI()


@app.on_event("startup")
def on_startup():
    create_db_and_tables()


@app.post("/heroes/", response_model=HeroPublic)
def create_hero(hero: HeroCreate):
    with Session(engine) as session:
        db_hero = Hero.model_validate(hero)
        session.add(db_hero)
        session.commit()
        session.refresh(db_hero)
        return db_hero


@app.get("/heroes/", response_model=list[HeroPublic])
def read_heroes(offset: int = 0, limit: int = Query(default=100, le=100)):
    with Session(engine) as session:
        heroes = session.exec(select(Hero).offset(offset).limit(limit)).all()
        return heroes


@app.get("/heroes/{hero_id}", response_model=HeroPublic)
def read_hero(hero_id: int):
    with Session(engine) as session:
        hero = session.get(Hero, hero_id)
        if not hero:
            raise HTTPException(status_code=404, detail="Hero not found")
        return hero


@app.patch("/heroes/{hero_id}", response_model=HeroPublic)
def update_hero(hero_id: int, hero: HeroUpdate):
    with Session(engine) as session:
        db_hero = session.get(Hero, hero_id)
        if not db_hero:
            raise HTTPException(status_code=404, detail="Hero not found")
        hero_data = hero.model_dump(exclude_unset=True)
        db_hero.sqlmodel_update(hero_data)
        session.add(db_hero)
        session.commit()
        session.refresh(db_hero)
        return db_hero


@app.delete("/heroes/{hero_id}")
def delete_hero(hero_id: int):
    with Session(engine) as session:
        hero = session.get(Hero, hero_id)
        if not hero:
            raise HTTPException(status_code=404, detail="Hero not found")
        session.delete(hero)
        session.commit()
        return {"ok": True}

After deleting it successfully, we just return a response of:

{
    "ok": true
}

Recap¶

That's it, feel free to try it out in the interactive docs UI to delete some heroes.

Using FastAPI to read data and combining it with SQLModel makes it quite straightforward to delete data from the database.