OpenAPI / Swagger

v2 status

LightAPI v2 does not include a built-in Swagger UI or OpenAPI schema endpoint. The v2 architecture is a pure Starlette ASGI application — you can integrate any OpenAPI tooling that works with Starlette.

Adding OpenAPI with Starlette

Starlette has native support for OpenAPI schema generation via starlette.routing.Route and the apispec/spectree/starlette-openapi ecosystem.

Option 1 — starlette-openapi (third-party)

uv add starlette-openapi

from sqlalchemy import create_engine
from lightapi import LightApi, RestEndpoint, Field
from starlette_openapi import OpenAPI

class BookEndpoint(RestEndpoint):
    title: str = Field(min_length=1)
    author: str

engine = create_engine("sqlite:///books.db")
app_instance = LightApi(engine=engine)
app_instance.register({"/books": BookEndpoint})

starlette_app = app_instance.build_app()

# Wrap with OpenAPI
openapi = OpenAPI(app=starlette_app, title="Book API", version="1.0.0")

Option 2 — spectree

uv add spectree

Option 3 — Manual schema endpoint

Add a static OpenAPI JSON route directly:

import json
from starlette.requests import Request
from starlette.responses import JSONResponse
from starlette.routing import Route
from lightapi import LightApi, RestEndpoint

class BookEndpoint(RestEndpoint):
    title: str
    author: str

engine = create_engine("sqlite:///books.db")
app = LightApi(engine=engine)
app.register({"/books": BookEndpoint})

async def openapi_schema(request: Request):
    schema = {
        "openapi": "3.0.0",
        "info": {"title": "My API", "version": "1.0.0"},
        "paths": {
            "/books": {
                "get":  {"summary": "List books",   "responses": {"200": {"description": "OK"}}},
                "post": {"summary": "Create a book", "responses": {"201": {"description": "Created"}}},
            },
        },
    }
    return JSONResponse(schema)

# Inject extra route before building
app._routes.append(Route("/openapi.json", endpoint=openapi_schema))
starlette_app = app.build_app()

Pydantic v2 schemas

LightAPI internally generates Pydantic v2 BaseModel subclasses for every endpoint. You can access them for schema introspection:

from lightapi import RestEndpoint, SchemaFactory, Field

class BookEndpoint(RestEndpoint):
    title: str = Field(min_length=1)
    author: str

schema_create, schema_read = SchemaFactory.build(BookEndpoint)

print(schema_create.model_json_schema())
# {
#   "properties": {
#     "title": {"minLength": 1, "title": "Title", "type": "string"},
#     "author": {"title": "Author", "type": "string"}
#   },
#   "required": ["title", "author"],
#   "title": "BookEndpointCreate",
#   "type": "object"
# }