// the find
noirbizarre/flask-restplus
Fully featured framework for fast, easy and documented API development with Flask
Flask-RESTPlus is a Flask extension for building REST APIs with automatic Swagger UI documentation, request parsing, and response marshalling. It's dead — the README itself says so, and the maintainers forked it to Flask-RESTX in 2019. If you're reading this in 2024+, you want Flask-RESTX instead.
- The decorator-based API model (ns.marshal_with, ns.expect, ns.doc) keeps route handlers clean and the Swagger spec generated automatically from the same annotations — no separate OpenAPI YAML to maintain
- Namespace support makes it practical to split a larger API across modules without losing the unified Swagger doc
- The field system for request parsing and response marshalling is explicit enough to catch shape mismatches early without pulling in a full schema library like Marshmallow
- Abandoned — last PyPI release was 0.13.0 in 2019, original author locked out maintainers from publishing, and the project officially redirects to its own fork. Installing this in a new project today is a mistake
- Swagger 2.0 only (see oas-2.0.json in schemas/) — no OpenAPI 3.x support, which matters if you need request body content negotiation, oneOf/anyOf schemas, or modern auth flows
- reqparse is a known design dead end — it mimics argparse for HTTP requests, which means flat key-value parsing with no nested body support. Flask-RESTX deprecated it too in favor of Marshmallow or similar
- Python 2.7 / 3.4+ compatibility claims in the README are a tell for how long this has been frozen — the test matrix and CI config haven't moved in years