# Behind a Proxy

In some situations, you might need to use a **proxy** server like Traefik or Nginx with a configuration that adds an extra path prefix that is not seen by your application.

In these cases you can use `root_path` to configure your application.

The `root_path` is a mechanism provided by the ASGI specification (that FastAPI is built on, through Starlette).

The `root_path` is used to handle these specific cases.

This works the same way as with Pydantic models. And it is actually achieved in the same way underneath, using Pydantic.

!!! info
    Keep in mind that dataclasses can't do everything Pydantic models can do.

    So, you might still need to use Pydantic models.

    But if you have a bunch of dataclasses laying around, this is a nice trick to use them to power a web API using FastAPI. 🤓

## Dataclasses in `response_model`

It uses the information from Webargs and Marshmallow to automatically generate OpenAPI schemas, using APISpec.

It's a great tool, very underrated. It should be way more popular than many Flask plug-ins out there. It might be due to its documentation being too concise and abstract.

This solved having to write YAML (another syntax) inside of Python docstrings.

If something seems interesting and useful to your project, go ahead and check it, but otherwise, you might probably just skip them.

!!! tip

This schema definition includes your API paths, the possible parameters they take, etc.

#### Data "schema"

The term "schema" might also refer to the shape of some data, like a JSON content.

In that case, it would mean the JSON attributes, and data types they have, etc.

#### OpenAPI and JSON Schema

### Disable Response Model

Continuing from the example above, you might not want to have the default data validation, documentation, filtering, etc. that is performed by FastAPI.

But you might want to still keep the return type annotation in the function to get the support from tools like editors and type checkers (e.g. mypy).

    url: https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/discussions/categories/questions
  - name: Feature Request
    about: To suggest an idea or ask about a feature, please start with a question saying what you would like to achieve. There might be a way to do it already.
    url: https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/discussions/categories/questions
  - name: Show and tell
    about: Show what you built with FastAPI or to be used with FastAPI.

    # For coverage
    assert UploadFile.__get_pydantic_core_schema__(str, lambda x: None) == {}


@needs_pydanticv1
def test_union_scalar_list():
    # For coverage
    # TODO: there might not be a current valid code path that uses this, it would
    # potentially enable query parameters defined as both a scalar and a list
    # but that would require more refactors, also not sure it's really useful

    ```

Notice that we declare the type of `current_user` as the Pydantic model `User`.

This will help us inside of the function with all the completion and type checks.

!!! tip
    You might remember that request bodies are also declared with Pydantic models.

    Here **FastAPI** won't get confused because you are using `Depends`.

!!! check

You can create production applications with **FastAPI** right now (and you have probably been doing it for some time), you just have to make sure that you use a version that works correctly with the rest of your code.

## Pin your `fastapi` version