Skip to main content

FastAPI tutorial

FastAPI tutorial — production patterns from day 1.

105 interactive lessons: Pydantic v2 validation, JWT auth, async + WebSockets, Docker + uvicorn worker math, Postgres RLS multi-tenancy, OpenTelemetry, blue/green deploys. Production-grade, not “hello world”.

▶ Start the track →See pricing

7-day free trial · Cancel in 1 click · $89/year for everything

What you'll cover

MODULE 1

FastAPI basics + Pydantic v2

Routes, dependency injection, request/response models. Pydantic v2 validators, field constraints, the @field_validator decorator. Why FastAPI's type-hint-driven validation beats hand-rolled checks.

MODULE 2

Auth + security

JWT + OAuth2 flows, password hashing (argon2 + bcrypt), refresh tokens, CSRF, rate-limit primitives. Why Depends(get_current_user) makes the rest of your code testable.

MODULE 3

Async + background tasks + WS

async def vs def, when async is faster (and when it's NOT), BackgroundTasks vs Celery, WebSockets with broadcasting, server-sent events for live dashboards.

MODULE 4

Production deployment

uvicorn + gunicorn worker math, graceful shutdown, health + readiness probes, Docker multistage builds, Caddy vs nginx for the reverse proxy, blue/green vs canary deploys.

MODULE 5

Real-world patterns

Rate limiting (token bucket via Redis), caching (cache-aside + write-through), RLS multi-tenancy on Postgres, OpenTelemetry tracing, feature flags, idempotency keys for payments.

MODULE 6

Capstone — Ship to prod

A real REST API for a task tracker — auth, async, Postgres + RLS, OpenAPI docs, OTel traces, Docker, deployed to Fly.io. With load test (Locust @ 5K req/s) and post-incident write-up template.

Questions

Do I need to know Python before FastAPI?

Yes — at least Python Foundations level (the first 15 lessons are free, no signup). FastAPI assumes you can write classes + decorators + type hints. If you have 6+ months of Django or Flask, you're more than ready.

Is this enough to land a backend job?

Combined with Python Foundations + 1-2 portfolio projects (the Project Studio has 12 to pick from), yes. Backend devs we've watched succeed pair FastAPI + System Design tracks.

How is it different from the official FastAPI tutorial?

The official docs teach you what the framework does. We teach you what production-grade FastAPI looks like (Pydantic v2, RLS, OTel, idempotency, blue/green, observability). The official tutorial gets you to lesson 5; this gets you to PR-merged.

Does it cover Pydantic v1 or v2?

v2 only. v1 docs are everywhere; we cover the v2 migration patterns (@field_validator, .model_dump, computed fields) since v2 is what 2026 codebases use.

Can I run FastAPI lessons in the browser?

FastAPI lessons are read+code-along (Skulpt can't run a real HTTP server in-browser). Each lesson links to a free Codespaces template so you can run the code on real infra in 60 seconds.