Django :How to integrate Django Rest framework in an existing application?

You do not need to begin a new project. The basic steps are:

1. Install DRF, something like pip install djangorestframework
2. Add rest_framework to your INSTALLED_APPS
3. Define your serialisers, views and routes.

And that's it.

I suggest you follow the Quickstart and step through the Tutorial — it's pretty welcoming really.

I hope that helps.

I created a short note about how to do this with the photo gallery app tutorial from the Forcier et. al. book. I'm a Django noob, so please take this stuff as not-authoritative-perhaps-not-even-good. Here's the link to the post:

https://technote.fyi/blog/2018/01/26/how-to-add-rest-api-existing-django-project/

Basically, you create a new app, then in it write code for only three files: serializers.py, views.py, and urls.py. You don't write anything in models.py. Instead, you import the models from the existing app.

You then start off by creating serializers for all the models you want to expose, and then views for those serializers, and, finally, urls to call those views.