Does FastAPI Work With Sanity?
FastAPI and Sanity work together seamlessly—use Sanity as your headless CMS backend and FastAPI as your API layer to query and serve content.
Quick Facts
How FastAPI Works With Sanity
FastAPI integrates naturally with Sanity's Content Delivery Network (CDN) via their REST and GraphQL APIs. You create a FastAPI application that acts as an intermediary or direct proxy to Sanity, fetching structured content and serving it to your frontend or mobile clients. This is ideal for adding authentication, caching, data transformation, or business logic on top of Sanity's content layer. Most developers use the official Sanity Python SDK (sanity-client) or make direct HTTP requests to Sanity's API endpoints from FastAPI route handlers. The developer experience is smooth: define your Pydantic models matching your Sanity schemas, fetch data in your route handlers, and return typed responses. You can leverage FastAPI's automatic OpenAPI documentation to document your content endpoints. One architectural consideration is whether to cache Sanity responses—Sanity provides real-time webhooks you can use to invalidate FastAPI-side caches when content changes. For production, most teams implement CORS carefully and use Sanity's API tokens securely as environment variables.
Best Use Cases
Quick Setup
pip install fastapi uvicorn sanity-client httpxfrom fastapi import FastAPI
from sanity.client import SanityClient
from pydantic import BaseModel
app = FastAPI()
client = SanityClient(
project_id="your_project_id",
dataset="production",
api_version="2024-01-01",
token="your_api_token" # Use environment variables in production
)
class Article(BaseModel):
_id: str
title: str
slug: str
body: str
@app.get("/articles", response_model=list[Article])
async def get_articles():
query = '*[_type == "article"] | order(publishedAt desc) [0:10]'
articles = client.fetch(query)
return articles
@app.get("/articles/{slug}", response_model=Article)
async def get_article(slug: str):
query = '*[_type == "article" && slug.current == $slug][0]'
article = client.fetch(query, {"slug": slug})
return articleKnown Issues & Gotchas
Sanity API rate limits (5000 requests/hour on free tier) can be hit quickly if FastAPI doesn't implement caching or request batching
Fix: Use FastAPI's caching mechanisms (Redis, in-memory cache) or Sanity's GraphQL batching to consolidate requests. Also consider upgrading Sanity plan for higher limits.
CORS issues when FastAPI serves requests from browser clients—Sanity API has its own CORS headers
Fix: Use FastAPI's CORSMiddleware to explicitly configure allowed origins, or proxy Sanity requests entirely through FastAPI
Sanity API tokens stored in FastAPI environment are sensitive—easy to accidentally expose in logs or error messages
Fix: Never log API tokens, use FastAPI's dependency injection for secure token management, and always validate tokens are set before deployment
Schema changes in Sanity aren't automatically reflected in FastAPI Pydantic models—manual updates required
Fix: Use code generation tools (Sanity's built-in CLI or third-party generators) to auto-generate Pydantic models from Sanity schemas
Alternatives
- •Next.js with Sanity SDK—full-stack TypeScript solution with built-in static generation and ISR
- •Express.js with Sanity—lighter Node.js alternative if you prefer simpler routing and middleware
- •Strapi with FastAPI—self-hosted headless CMS instead of cloud-based Sanity, more control over infrastructure
Resources
Related Compatibility Guides
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