## Previous Steps Before Starting

There are many cases where you want to perform some steps **before starting** your application.

For example, you might want to run **database migrations**.

But in most cases, you will want to perform these steps only **once**.

So, you will want to have a **single process** to perform those **previous steps**, before starting the application.

    ```

!!! note
    Notice that, in this case, the `item` that would be taken from the body is optional. As it has a `None` default value.

## Multiple body parameters

In the previous example, the *path operations* would expect a JSON body with the attributes of an `Item`, like:

```JSON
{
    "name": "Foo",
    "description": "The pretender",
    "price": 42.0,
    "tax": 3.2
}
```

# Classes as Dependencies

Before diving deeper into the **Dependency Injection** system, let's upgrade the previous example.

## A `dict` from the previous example

In the previous example, we were returning a `dict` from our dependency ("dependable"):

=== "Python 3.10+"

    ```Python hl_lines="9"
    {!> ../../../docs_src/dependencies/tutorial001_an_py310.py!}
    ```

=== "Python 3.9+"

    ```Python hl_lines="11"

# Tutorial - User Guide

This tutorial shows you how to use **FastAPI** with most of its features, step by step.

Each section gradually builds on the previous ones, but it's structured to separate topics, so that you can go directly to any specific one to solve your specific API needs.

It is also built to work as a future reference.

So you can come back and see exactly what you need.

## Run the code

But at some point, there was no other option than creating something that provided all these features, taking the best ideas from previous tools, and combining them in the best way possible, using language features that weren't even available before (Python 3.6+ type hints).

## Previous tools

### <a href="https://www.djangoproject.com/" class="external-link" target="_blank">Django</a>

```Python hl_lines="4  11  15-18"
{!../../../docs_src/templates/tutorial001.py!}
```

!!! note
    Before FastAPI 0.108.0, Starlette 0.29.0, the `name` was the first parameter.

    Also, before that, in previous versions, the `request` object was passed as part of the key-value pairs in the context for Jinja2.

!!! tip
    By declaring `response_class=HTMLResponse` the docs UI will be able to know that the response will be HTML.

And also the docs about <a href="https://strawberry.rocks/docs/integrations/fastapi" class="external-link" target="_blank">Strawberry with FastAPI</a>.

## Older `GraphQLApp` from Starlette

Previous versions of Starlette included a `GraphQLApp` class to integrate with <a href="https://graphene-python.org/" class="external-link" target="_blank">Graphene</a>.

You could want to set up a different database for testing, rollback the data after the tests, pre-fill it with some testing data, etc.

The main idea is exactly the same you saw in that previous chapter.

## Add tests for the SQL app

Let's update the example from [SQL (Relational) Databases](../tutorial/sql-databases.md){.internal-link target=_blank} to use a testing database.

This code is something you can actually use in your application, save the password hashes in your database, etc.

We are going to start from where we left in the previous chapter and increment it.

## About JWT

JWT means "JSON Web Tokens".

It's a standard to codify a JSON object in a long dense string without spaces. It looks like this:

```

This is the basic idea. But you will probably want to take care of some additional things, like:

* Security - HTTPS
* Running on startup
* Restarts
* Replication (the number of processes running)
* Memory
* Previous steps before starting