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Bible API

A modern, asynchronous REST API supporting muliple versions including the 81-book Ethiopian Church canon, built with Python 3.13, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and Redis.

#python#fastapi#bibleapi#opensource
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Overview

The Bible API is an open-source backend service designed to provide programmatic access to the biblical canon of different Language.

Architecture & Technology Stack

The service is built around a fully asynchronous Python stack engineered for high concurrency, low latency, and predictable operational deployment:

  • Python 3.13 & uv: Managed with Astral’s uv package manager for fast, reproducible dependency resolution and lockfile freezing (uv.lock).
  • FastAPI: Provides OpenAPI 3.1/Swagger autodocumentation, high-performance async request handling, and strict Pydantic v2 data validation schemas.
  • PostgreSQL 15 & asyncpg: Relational persistence utilizing SQLAlchemy 2.0 with the high-throughput asyncpg driver and AsyncSession context managers.
  • Alembic: Database migration pipeline managing version-controlled relational schema changes across environments.
  • Redis 7: In-memory caching layer via redis.asyncio with connection pooling to cache frequently queried books, chapters, and verse sets.
  • Docker & Docker Compose: Multi-container orchestrator providing local parity with isolated network topologies for the API, Postgres database, and Redis cache.

Technical Highlights

1. Fully Asynchronous Pipeline

Every I/O boundary — from relational database queries to Redis cache reads and writes — is non-blocking. Database connections are injected using FastAPI dependencies:

2. Standardized Pagination & Query Patterns

To efficiently handle large scripture queries across chapters and verses, the core engine implements a generic pagination schema Page[T] with bounded query limits:

3. Containerized Reproducibility

The application uses a lightweight multi-stage Docker build with frozen uv syncing for rapid cold starts and predictable production behavior:

What’s Next

  • Multi-Language Alignments: Parallel verse endpoints supporting Ge’ez (ግዕዝ), Amharic (አማርኛ), and English translations.
  • Full-Text Morphological Search: PostgreSQL TSVector with custom analyzers for Ethiopic Fidel scripts.
  • Public API Cloud Deployment: Live hosted instance with Redis token-bucket rate limiting for open developer access.