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This guide helps you to connect your Local APIs with Appsmith using ngrok

Local DB and APIs

{% embed url="https://youtu.be/IUX2rXmS17E" %}

Appsmith allows you to work with local APIs using the help of ngrok. In this guide, let’s look at how we can build an Appsmith application utilising the local APIs running on our machine

Building a Simple Local API

If you have your local APIs ready, you can skip to the next section. Here, as an example, we’ll use a Python FastAPI server for serving a simple local API. Let’s install the necessary packages using pip:

$ pip install fastapi uvicorn

Now let’s write a script that’ll serve as a simple API request, below is the code snippet:

from fastapi import FastAPI

app = FastAPI()

items = [{     
       "name": "Counter-Strike",
       "appid": 10,
       "average_playtime": 17612,
       "genres": "Action",
       "price": 7.2
     },
     {
       "name": "Team Fortress Classic",
       "appid": 20,
       "average_playtime": 277,
       "genres": "Action",
       "price": 3.99
     }]


@app.get("/")
async def root():
   return items

Here, we imported the FastAPI library, initiated an app using the FastAPI class. Next, we define a simple list consisting of details of steam games as objects

Lastly, we declare a route “/” at which the items variables (game objects) are being returned. We can get this server running by using the following command:

$ uvicorn main:app --reload

The command uvicorn main:app refers to:

  • main: the file main.py (the Python "module").
  • app: the object created inside of main.py with the line app = FastAPI().
  • --reload: make the server restart after code changes. Only use for development.

Awesome, with this we should see our API running at http://127.0.0.1:8000 !

Setting ngrok

Now that we have our local APIs, let’s use ngrok to serve them on production. For this, we’ll have to signup at ngrok (it’s free!), and follow the instructions to connect your account.

  1. Download the ngrok installation file and unzip it.
  2. Add your auth-token to the default ngrok.yml configuration file using:
$ ./ngrok authtoken <your-auth-token>

Fire up ngrok, we already have our API server ready, now we’ll have to expose the particular local port for HTTP tunnel forwarding using the following command:

$ ./ngrok http 8000

Awesome, we can now see that the local APIs are now being forwarded to a different server on production using ngrok. Below is a screenshot,

Testing APIs on Appsmith

Now that we have API, up and running, let’s test these out on Appsmith.

  • Create an application on Appsmith
  • Create a New API by clicking on the + icon next to the APIs section on the left navigation and rename it to getGames
  • Add the forwarded API link and hit RUN, we’ll have to see the API response on the response pane.
  • Next, navigate to Pages, and drag and drop a Table Widget on to the canvas.
  • Open the table property pane and add use the API to display data on to the table by adding the following code snippet under the Table Data property:
{{ getGames.data }}

Below is a GIF, following the same steps: