Fr

ee

Flask is a powerful web development framework for

Python that builds web apps quickly and with less
code. With its lightweight and efficient Web development
framework, Flask combines rapid development and
clean, simple design.
Starting with the creation of a "Hello world" Flask app, you
will be introduced to the most common Flask APIs and
Flask's debugger. You will learn how to store and retrieve
blog posts using an ORM and to map URLs to views. You
will learn to validate users, build log in/log out functionality,
and add an administrative dashboard for the blog. Moving
on, you will be able to see how the mock library can simplify
testing complex interactions.
Finally, you will learn to deploy Flask applications securely
and in an automated, repeatable manner, and explore
some of the popular Flask resources on the Web.

Who this book is written for

Create your web pages to add modularity

and flexibility to your web app using
templates

P U B L I S H I N G

Develop schema migrations with Alembic

Produce an admin section using Flask-admin

C o m m u n i t y

Build RESTful APIs using Flask-Restless

Simulate requests and sessions using
the Flask test client
Make AJAX requests from Jinja2 templates

$ 44.99 US
28.99 UK

community experience distilled

pl

Store and retrieve relational data using

SQLAlchemy

Matt Copperwaite
Charles Leifer

This book is for anyone who wants to develop their

knowledge of Python into something that can be used on
the web. Flask follows Python design principles and
can be easily understood by anyone who knows Python,
and even by those who do not.

What you will learn from this book

Learning Flask Framework

Learning Flask
Framework

Sa
m

D i s t i l l e d

Learning Flask
Framework
Build dynamic, data-driven websites and modern web applications
with Flask

Prices do not include

local sales tax or VAT
where applicable

Visit www.PacktPub.com for books, eBooks,

code, downloads, and PacktLib.

E x p e r i e n c e

Matt Copperwaite
Charles Leifer

In this package, you will find:

The authors biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 1 'Creating Your
First Flask Application'
A synopsis of the books content
More information on Learning Flask Framework

About the Authors

Matt Copperwaite graduated from the University of Plymouth in 2008 with a

bachelor of science (Hons) degree in computer systems and networks. Since then,
he has worked in various private and public sectors in the UK. Matt is currently
working as a Python software developer and DevOps engineer for the UK
Government, focusing mainly on Django. However, his first love is Flask, with
which he has built several products under the General Public License (GPL).
Matt is also a trustee of South London Makerspace, a hackerspace community in
South London; a cohost of The Dick Turpin Road Show, a podcast for free and open
source software; and LUG Master of Greater London Linux User Group.
He has also been the technical reviewer of the Flask Framework Cookbook.

Charles Leifer is a professional software engineer with 6 years of experience

using Python. He is the author of several popular open source libraries, including
Peewee ORM and Huey, a multithreaded task queue. He is also the cocreator of
https://readthedocs.org, a free documentation hosting platform.
Charles developed a passion for Python while working at the Journal World. His
colleagues there patiently answered his endless questions and taught him everything
about the Web, Linux, open source, and how to write clean Python.
Charles maintains an active programming blog at http://charlesleifer.com.

Preface
Welcome to Learning Flask, the book that will teach you the necessary skills to
build web applications with Flask, a lightweight Python web framework. This
book takes an example-driven approach that is designed to get you started quickly.
The practical examples are balanced with just the right amount of background
information to ensure that you understand not only the how, but also the why of
Flask development.
Flask was originally released by Armin Ronacher as part of an elaborate April
Fool's Day prank in 2010. The project touted itself as, "The next generation python
micro web-framework," and lampooned features made popular by similar
microframeworks. Although Flask was intended as a prank, the authors were
caught by surprise when many people expressed serious interest in the project.
Flask is a microframework that is built on top of two excellent libraries: the Jinja2
templating engine, and the Werkzeug WSGI toolkit. Despite being a relative
new-comer compared to other frameworks, such as Django, and Pylons, Flask has
garnered a large and loyal following. Flask provides powerful tools for common
web development tasks and encourages a bring-your-own-library approach for
everything else, allowing programmers the flexibility to pick and choose the best
components for their application. Every Flask app is different, and as the project's
documentation states, "Flask is Fun".
The Flask microframework represents a departure in terms of design and API from
most other popular Python web frameworks, which has led many developers that
are new to Flask to ask, "What is the right way to build an app?" Flask does not offer
any strong opinions on how we, the developers, should build our app. Instead, it
provides opinions on what you need to build an app. Flask can be thought of as a
collection of objects and functions to deal with common web tasks, such as routing
URLs to code, processing request data, and rendering templates. While the level
of flexibility that Flask provides is liberating, it can also lead to confusion and
poor designs.

Preface

The purpose of this book is to help you see this flexibility as opportunity. Over
the course of this book, we will be building and progressively enhancing a Flaskpowered blogging site. New concepts will be introduced through the addition of
new features to the site. By the end of the book, we will have created a fully-featured
website, and you will have a strong working knowledge of Flask and the ecosystem
of its commonly-used extensions and libraries.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Creating Your First Flask Application, begins with the bold declaration,
"Flask is fun", which is one of the first things that you see when you view the official
Flask documentation, and in this chapter, you will get to grips with why so many
Python developers agree.
Chapter 2, Relational Databases with SQLAlchemy, says that relational databases are
the bedrock upon which almost all modern web applications are built. We will use
SQLAlchemy, a powerful object-relational mapper that allows us to abstract away
the complexities of multiple database engines. In this chapter, you will learn about
how the data model that you choose early on will affect almost every facet of the code
that follows.
Chapter 3, Templates and Views, covers two of the most recognizable components of
the framework: the Jinja2 template language, and the URL routing framework. We
will fully immerse ourselves in Flask and see our app finally start to take shape.
As we progress through the chapter, our app will start looking like a proper website.
Chapter 4, Forms and Validation, shows you how to use forms to modify content on
your blog directly through the site handled by the popular WTForms library. This
is a fun chapter because we will add all sorts of new ways to interact with our site.
We will create forms to work with our data models and learn how to receive and
validate user data.
Chapter 5, Authenticating Users, explains how you can add user authentication to
your site. Being able to distinguish one user from another allows us to develop an
entirely new class of features. For instance, we will see how to restrict access to the
create, edit, and delete views, preventing anonymous users from tampering with
site content. We can also display a user's draft posts to them but hide them from
everyone else.

Preface

Chapter 6, Building an Administrative Dashboard, shows you how you can build an
administrative dashboard for your site, using the excellent Flask-Admin. Our admin
dashboard will give certain selected users the ability to manage all the content across
the entire site. In essence, the admin site will be a graphical frontend for the database,
supporting operations to create, edit, and delete rows in our application's tables.
Chapter 7, AJAX and RESTful APIs, uses Flask-Restless to create a RESTful API
for the blogging app. A RESTful API is a powerful way of accessing your app
programmatically by providing highly-structured data to represent it. Flask-Restless
works very well with our SQLAlchemy models, and it also handles complex tasks,
such as serialization, and result filtering.
Chapter 8, Testing Flask Apps, covers how you can write unit tests covering all parts
of the blogging app. We will utilize Flask's test client to simulate "live" requests. We
will also see how the Mock library can simplify testing complex interactions, such as
calling third-party services, such as databases.
Chapter 9, Excellent Extensions, teaches you how to enhance your Flask installation
with popular third-party extensions. We used extensions throughout the book, but
we can now explore the added extra security or functionality with very little effort
and can polish off your app nicely.
Chapter 10, Deploying Your Application, teaches you how to deploy your Flask
applications securely and in an automated, repeatable manner. We will look at how
to configure the commonly-used WSGI capable servers, such as Apache and Nginx,
as well as the Python web server Gunicorn, to give you plenty of options. Then, we
will see how to secure part or the entire site using SSL before finally wrapping up
our application in a configuration management tool to automate our deployment.

Creating Your
First Flask Application
Flask is fun. This bold declaration is one of the first things you see when you view
the official Flask documentation and, over the course of this book, you will come to
understand why so many Python developers agree.
In this chapter we shall:

Briefly discuss the features of the Flask framework

Set up a development environment and install Flask

Implement a minimal Flask app and analyze how it works

Experiment with commonly used APIs and the interactive debugger

Start working on the blog project that will be progressively enhanced over
the course of the book

What is Flask?
Flask is a lightweight Web framework written in Python. Flask started out as
an April fool's joke that became a highly popular underdog in the Python web
framework world. It is now one of the most widely used Python web frameworks
for start-ups, and is becoming commonly accepted as the perfect tool for quick and
simple solutions in most businesses. At its core, it provides a set of powerful libraries
for handling the most common web development tasks, such as:

URL routing that makes it easy to map URLs to your code

Template rendering with Jinja2, one of the most powerful Python

template engines
[1]

Creating Your First Flask Application

Session management and securing cookies

HTTP request parsing and flexible response handling

Interactive web-based debugger

Easy-to-use, flexible application configuration management

This book will teach you how to use these tools through practical, real-world
examples. We will also discuss commonly used third-party libraries for things that
are not included in Flask, such as database access and form validation. By the end of
this book you will be ready to tackle your next big project with Flask.

With great freedom comes great responsibility

As the documentation states, Flask is fun, but it can also be challenging, especially
when you are building a large application. Unlike other popular Python web
frameworks, such as Django, Flask does not enforce ways of structuring your
modules or your code. If you have experience with other web frameworks, you may
be surprised how writing applications in Flask feels like writing Python as opposed
to the framework boilerplate.
This book will teach you to use Flask to write clean, expressive applications. As you
progress through this book, you will not only become a proficient Flask developer
but you will also become a stronger Python developer.

Setting up a development environment

Flask is written in Python, so before we can start writing Flask apps we must ensure
that Python is installed. Most Linux distributions and recent versions of OSX come
with Python pre-installed. The examples in this book will require Python 2.6 or 2.7.
Instructions for installing Python can be found at http://www.python.org.
If this is your first time using Python, there are a number of excellent resources
available for free on the web. I would recommend Learn Python The Hard Way, by Zed
Shaw, available for free online at http://learnpythonthehardway.org. Looking
for more? You can find a large list of free Python resources at http://resrc.io/
list/10/list-of-free-programming-books/#python.

[2]

Chapter 1

You can verify that Python is installed and that you have the correct version by
running the Python interactive interpreter from a command prompt:
$ python
Python 2.7.6 (default, Nov 26 2013, 12:52:49)
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
information.
>>>

At the prompt (>>>) type exit() and hit Enter to leave the interpreter.

Supporting Python 3
This book will include code that is compatible with both Python 2 and Python 3
where possible. Unfortunately, since Python 3 is still relatively new as compared
to Python 2, not all third-party packages used in this book are guaranteed to work
seamlessly with Python 3. There is a lot of effort being put into making popular
open-source libraries compatible with both versions but, at the time of writing, some
libraries have still not been ported. For best results, ensure that the version of Python
that you have installed on your system is 2.6 or above.

Installing Python packages

Now that you have ensured that Python is installed correctly, we will install some
popular Python packages that will be used over the course of this book.
We will be installing these packages system-wide but, once they are installed, we
will be working exclusively in virtual environments.

Installing pip
The de-facto Python package installer is pip . We will use it throughout the book to
install Flask and other third-party libraries.
If you already have setuptools installed, you can install pip by simply running the
following command:
$ sudo easy_install pip

[3]

Creating Your First Flask Application

After completing the installation, verify that pip is installed correctly:

$ pip --version
pip 1.2.1 from /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-1.2.1-py2.7.egg
(python 2.7)

The version numbers are likely to change, so for a definitive guide please consult the
official instructions, which can be found at http://www.pipinstaller.org/en/latest/installing.html.

Installing virtualenv
Once pip is installed, we can proceed to install the most important tool in any
Python developer's toolkit: virtualenv. Virtualenv makes it easy to produce
isolated Python environments, complete with their own copies of system and
third-party packages.

Why use virtualenv?

Virtualenv solves a number of problems related to package management. Imagine
you have an old application that was built using a very early version of Flask, and
you would like to build a new project using the most-recent version of Flask. If Flask
was installed system-wide, you was be forced to either upgrade your old project or
write your new project against the old Flask. If both projects were using virtualenv,
then each could run its own version of Flask, with no conflicts or issues.
Virtualenv makes it easy to control which versions of the third-party package is used
by your project.
Another consideration is that installing packages system-wide generally requires
elevated privileges (sudo pip install foo). By using virtualenvs, you can create
Python environments and install packages as a regular user. This is especially useful
if you are deploying to a shared hosting environment or are in a situation where you
do not have administrator privileges.

Installing virtualenv with pip

We will use pip to install virtualenv; since it is a standard Python package, it can be
installed just like any other Python package. To ensure that virtualenv is installed
system-wide, run the following command (it requires elevated privileges):
$ sudo pip install virtualenv
$ virtualenv --version
1.10.1
[4]

Chapter 1

The version numbers are likely to change, so for a definitive guide please consult the
official instructions at http://virtualenv.org.

Creating your first Flask app

Now that we have the proper tools installed, we're ready to create our first Flask app.
To begin, create a directory somewhere convenient that will hold all of your Python
projects. At the command prompt or terminal, navigate to your projects directory;
mine is /home/charles/projects, or ~/projects for short on Unix-based systems.
$ mkdir ~/projects
$ cd ~/projects

Now we will create a virtualenv. The commands below will create a new directory
named hello_flask inside your projects folder that contains a complete, isolated
Python environment.
$ virtualenv hello_flask
New python executable in hello_flask/bin/python2.
Also creating executable in hello_flask/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
Installing pip...............done.
$ cd hello_flask

If you list the contents of the hello_flask directory, you will see that it has created
several sub-directories, including a bin folder (Scripts on Windows) that contains
copies of both Python and pip. The next step is to activate your new virtualenv. The
instructions differ depending on whether you are using Windows or Mac OS/Linux.
To activate your virtualenv refer to the following screenshot:

Creating the hello_flask virtualenv

[5]

Creating Your First Flask Application

When you activate a virtualenv, your PATH environment variable is

temporarily modified to ensure that any packages you install or use are restricted
to your virtualenv.

Installing Flask in your virtualenv

Now that we've verified that our virtualenv is set up correctly, we can install Flask.
When you are inside a virtualenv, you should never install packages with
administrator privileges. If you receive a permission error when attempting to install
Flask, double-check that you have activated your virtualenv correctly (you should
see (hello_flask) in your command prompt).
(hello_flask) $ pip install Flask

You will see some text scroll by as pip downloads the Flask package and the related
dependencies before installing it into your virtualenv. Flask depends on a couple of
additional third-party libraries, which pip will automatically download and install
for you. Let's verify that everything is installed properly:
(hello_flask) $ python
>>> import flask
>>> flask.__version__
'0.10.1'
>>> flask
<module 'flask' from
'/home/charles/projects/hello_flask/lib/python2.7/sitepackages/flask/__init__.pyc'>

Congratulations! You've installed Flask and now we are ready to start coding.

Hello, Flask!
Create a new file in the hello_flask virtualenv named app.py. Using your favorite
text editor or IDE, enter the following code:
from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/')
def index():

[6]

Chapter 1
return 'Hello, Flask!'
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(debug=True)

Save the file and then execute app.py by running it from the command line. You will
need to ensure that you have activated the hello_flask virtualenv:
$ cd ~/projects/hello_flask
(hello_flask) $ python app.py
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/

Open your favorite web-browser and navigate to the URL displayed

(http://127.0.0.1:5000). You should see the message Hello, Flask! displayed
on a blank white page. By default, the Flask development server runs locally on
127.0.0.1, bound to port 5000.

Your first Flask app.

Understanding the code

We just created a very basic Flask app. To understand what's happening let's take
this code apart line-by-line.
from flask import Flask

Our app begins by importing the Flask class. This class represents a single WSGI
application and is the central object in any Flask project.
WSGI is the Python standard web server interface, defined in PEP 333. You can
think of WSGI as a set of behaviors and methods that, when implemented, allow
your web app to just work with a large number of webservers. Flask handles all the
implementation details for you, so you can focus on writing you web app.
app = Flask(__name__)

[7]

Creating Your First Flask Application

In this line, we create an application instance in the variable app and pass it the
name of our module. The variable app can of course be anything, however app is
a common convention for most Flask applications. The application instance is the
central registry for things such as views, URL routes, template configuration, and
much more. We provide the name of the current module so that the application is
able to find resources by looking inside the current folder. This will be important
later when we want to render templates or serve static files.
@app.route('/')
def index():
return 'Hello, Flask!'

In the preceding lines, we are instructing our Flask app to route all requests for / (the
root URL) to this view function (index). A view is simply a function or a method that
returns a response of some kind. Whenever you open a browser and navigate to the
root URL of our app, Flask will call this view function and send the return value to
the browser.
There are a few things to note about these lines of code:

@app.route is a Python decorator from the app variable defined above. This
decorator (app.route) wraps the following function, in this case,index, in
order to route requests for a particular URL to a particular view. Index is
chosen as the name for the function here, as it's the common name for the
first page that a web server uses. Other examples could be homepage or
main. Decorators are a rich and interesting subject for Python developers, so
if you are not familiar with them, I recommend using your favorite search
engine to find a good tutorial.

The index function takes no arguments. This might seem odd if you are
coming from other web-frameworks and were expecting a request object
or something similar. We will see in the following examples how to access
values from the request.

The index function returns a plain string object. In later examples, we will
see how to render templates to return HTML.

The following lines execute our app using the built-in development server in
debug mode. The 'if' statement is a common Python convention that ensures
that the app will only be run when we run our script via python app.py, and
will not run if we try to import this app from another Python file.
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(debug=True)

[8]

Chapter 1

Routes and requests

Right now our Flask app isn't much fun, so let's look at the different ways in which
we can add more interesting behavior to our web app. One common way is to add
responsive behavior so that our app will look at values in the URL and handle them.
Let's add a new route to our Hello Flask app called hello. This new route will
display a greeting to the person whose name appears in the URL:
from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/')
def index():
return 'Hello, Flask!'
@app.route('/hello/<name>')
def hello(name):
return 'Hello, %s' % name
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(debug=True)

Again, let's run our app and open it up in a web browser. We can now navigate to a
URL such as http://127.0.0.1/hello/Charlie and see our custom message:

Our Flask app displaying a custom message

In the preceding example, the route we added specifies a single parameter: name.
This parameter also appears in the function declaration as the sole argument. Flask is
automatically matching the URL /hello/Charlie to the hello view; this is known
as mapping. It then passes the string Charlie into our view function as an argument.

[9]

Creating Your First Flask Application

What happens if we navigate to http://127.0.0.1:5000/hello/ without

specifying a name? As you can see, the Flask development server will return a 404
response, indicating that the URL did not match any known routes.

Flask 404 page

Reading values from the request

In addition to the URL, values can be passed to your app in the query string. The
query string is made up of arbitrary keys and values that are tacked onto the URL,
using a question-mark:
URL
/hello/?name=Charlie

Argument Values
name: Charlie

/hello/?name=Charlie&favorite_
color=green

name: Charlie
favorite_color: green

In order to access these values inside your view functions, Flask provides a request
object that encapsulates all sorts of information about the current HTTP request. In
the following example, we will modify our hello view to also respond to names
passed in via the query string. If no name is specified either on the query-string or in
the URL, we will return a 404.
from flask import Flask, abort, request
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/')
def index():
return 'Hello, Flask!'
@app.route('/hello/<name>')
@app.route('/hello/')
def hello(name=None):
[ 10 ]

Chapter 1
if name is None:
# If no name is specified in the URL, attempt to retrieve it
# from the query string.
name = request.args.get('name')
if name:
return 'Hello, %s' % name
else:
# No name was specified in the URL or the query string.
abort(404)
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(debug=True)

As you can see, we have added another route decorator to our hello view: Flask
allows you to map multiple URL routes to the same view. Because our new route
does not contain a name parameter, we need to modify the argument signature of
our view function to make name an optional parameter, which we accomplish by
providing a default value of None.
The function body of our view has also been modified to check for the presence of
a name in the URL. If no name is specified, we will abort with a 404 page not found
status code.

Greet someone using the query string

Debugging Flask applications

It is inevitable that, sooner or later, we will introduce a bug into our code. Since bugs
are inevitable, the best thing we can hope for as developers is good tools that help
us diagnose and fix bugs quickly. Luckily, Flask comes bundled with an extremely
powerful web-based debugger. The Flask debugger makes it possible to introspect
the state of your application the moment an error occurs, removing the need to
sprinkle in print statements or breakpoints.
This can be enabled by telling the Flask app to run in debug mode at run time.
We can do this in a few ways but we have actually already done this through the
following code:
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(debug=True)
[ 11 ]

Creating Your First Flask Application

In order to try it out, let's introduce a bug to the hello_flask app by creating a typo.
Here I have simply deleted the trailing e from the variable name:
@app.route('/hello/<name>')
@app.route('/hello/')
def hello(name=None):
if nam is None:
# No name was specified in the URL or the query string.
abort(404)

When we fire up the development server and attempt to access our view, we are now
presented with the debugging page:

.
The Flask interactive debugger running in a web browser

[ 12 ]

Chapter 1

This list of code is called a Traceback and it is made up of the call stack, the nested
list of function calls that preceded the actual error. The traceback usually provides
a very good clue as to what may have happened. At the very bottom we see the line
of code we intentionally mistyped along with the actual Python error, which is a
NameError exception telling us that nam is not defined.

Traceback detail showing our typo and a description of the error

The real magic happens when you place your mouse on the highlighted line with the
mouse. On the right-hand side you will see two small icons representing a terminal
and a source code file. Clicking the Source Code icon will expand the source code
surrounding the line that contained the error. This is very useful for establishing
some context when interpreting an error.
The terminal icon is the most interesting. When you click the Terminal icon, a small
console appears with the standard Python prompt. This prompt allows you to inspect,
in real-time, the values of the local variables at the time of the exception. Try typing
in name and hitting Enterit should display the value, if any, that was specified in the
URL. We can also introspect the current request arguments as follows:

Introspecting variables using the debugging console

As you work through the chapters and experiment on your own, being able to quickly
diagnose and correct any bugs will be an extremely valuable skill. We will return to the
interactive debugger in Chapter 8, Testing Flask Apps but, for now, be aware that it exists
and can be used to introspect your code when and where it breaks.

[ 13 ]

Creating Your First Flask Application

Introducing the blog project

Over the rest of this book, we will be building, enhancing, and deploying a
programmer-friendly blogging site. This project will introduce you to the most
common web development tasks, such as working with relational databases,
processing and validating form data, and (everyone's favorite), testing. In each
chapter, you will learn a new skill through practical, hands-on coding projects. In
the following table, I've listed a brief description of the core skills paired with the
corresponding features of the blog:
Skill

Blog site feature(s)

Relational databases with

SQLAlchemy

Store entries and tags in a relational database.

Perform a wide variety of queries, including
pagination, date-ranges, full-text search, inner and
outer joins, and more.

Flask-SQLAlchemy
Form processing and validation
Flask-WTF
Template rendering with Jinja2
Jinja2
User authentication and
administrative dashboards
Flask-Login
Ajax and RESTful APIs
Flask-API
Unit testing
unittest
Everything else

Create and edit blog entries using forms. In later

chapters, we will also use forms for logging users
into the site and allowing visitors to post comments.
Create a clean, extensible set of templates, making
use of inheritance and includes, where appropriate.
Store user accounts in the database and restrict the
post management page to registered users. Build
an administrative panel for managing posts, user
accounts, and for displaying stats such as pageviews, IP geolocation, and more.
Build an Ajax-powered commenting system that
will be displayed on each entry. Expose blog entries
using a RESTful API, and build a simple commandline client for posting entries using the API.
We will build a full suite of tests for the blog, and
learn how to simulate real requests and use mocks
to simplify complex interactions.
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection,
Atom feeds, spam detection, asynchronous task
execution, deploying, Secure Socket Layer (SSL),
hosting providers, and more.

[ 14 ]

Chapter 1

The spec
It's always a good idea when starting a large project to have a functional specification
in mind. For the blogging site, our spec will simply be the list of features that we
want our blog to have. These features are based on my experience in building my
personal blog:

Entries should be entered using web-based interfaces. For formatting,

the author can use Markdown, a lightweight, visually appealing
markup language.

Images can be uploaded to the site and easily embedded in blog entries.

Entries can be organized using any number of tags.

The site should support multiple authors.

Entries can be displayed in order of publication, but also listed by month,

by tag, or by author. Long lists of entries will be paginated.

Entries can be saved as drafts and viewed by their author but nobody else
until they are published.

Visitors to the site can post comments on entries, which will be checked
for spam and then left to the author's discretion as to whether they should
remain visible.

Atom feeds will be made available for all posts, including separate feeds for
each author and tag.

Entries can be accessed using a RESTful API. Authors will be given an API
token that will allow them to modify entries using the API.

While this list is not exhaustive, it covers the core functionality of our blogging site
and you will hopefully find it both fun and challenging to build. At the end of the
book, I will present some ideas for additional features that you might add, but first
you need to become comfortable working with Flask. I'm sure you're eager to get
started, so let's set up our blogging project.

Creating the blog project

Let's start by creating a new project within our working directory; on my laptop this
is /home/charles/projects, or on a Unix system ~/projects, for short. This is
exactly what we did when we created the hello_flask app:
$ cd ~/projects
$ mkdir blog
$ cd blog

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Creating Your First Flask Application

We will then need to set up our virtualenv environment. This differs from what we
did earlier as this is a more structured way of using virtualenv:
$ virtualenv blog

The next step will be to install Flask into our virtualenv. To do this, we will activate
the virtualenv and use pip to install Flask:
$ source blog/bin/activate
(blog) $ pip install Flask

Up until now, all of this should be somewhat familiar to you. However, instead of
creating a single file for our app, which we are definitely allowed to do and that
makes sense for very small apps, we can also create a new folder named app that
will allow us to make our app modular and more logical. Inside that folder, we will
create five empty files named __init__.py, app.py, config.py, main.py, and
views.py as follows:
mkdir app
touch app/{__init__,app,config,main,views}.py

This last command uses a little trick of your shell to create multiple files with the
names within the brackets. If you use version control, you will want to treat the app
directory as the root of your repository. The app directory will contain the source
code, templates, and static assets for the blog app. If you haven't used version
control, now would be a great time to give it a try. Pro Git is a great resource and is
available for free at http://git-scm.com/book.
What are these files that we just created? As you will see, each file serves an
important purpose. Hopefully their names provide a clue as to their purpose, but
here is a brief overview of each module's responsibility:
__init__.py

Tells Python to use the app/ directory as a python package

app.py

The Flask app

config.py

Configuration variables for our Flask app

main.py

Entry-point for executing our application

views.py

URL routes and views for the app

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Chapter 1

A barebones Flask app

Let's fill in these files with the minimum amount of code needed to create a runnable
Flask app. This will get our project in good shape for the second chapter, in which
we'll start working on the code to store and retrieve blog entries from the database.
We will start with the config.py module. This module will contain a
Configuration class that instructs Flask that we want to run our app in the DEBUG
mode. Add the following two lines of code to the config.py module as follows:
class Configuration(object):
DEBUG = True

Next we will create our Flask app and instruct it to use the configuration values
specified in the config module. Add the following code to the app.py module:
from flask import Flask
from config import Configuration

# import our configuration data.

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config.from_object(Configuration)
Configuration object.

# use values from our

The views module will contain a single view mapped to the root URL of the site.
Add the following code to views.py:
from app import app
@app.route('/')
def homepage():
return 'Home page'

As you probably noticed, we are still missing our call to app.run(). We will put
that code in main.py, which we will use as the entry-point into our app. Add the
following code to the main.py module:
from app import app
import views

# import our Flask app

if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run()

We do not call app.run(debug=True) because we have already instructed Flask to

run our app in the debug mode in the Configuration object.

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Creating Your First Flask Application

You can run the app from the command-line by executing the main module as follows:
$ python main.py
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/
* Restarting with reloader

From humble beginnings...

Zooming out
Other than the Configuration class, most of this code should look familiar to you.
We have basically taken the code from the hello_flask example and separated it
into several modules. It may seem silly to write only two or three lines of code per
file, but as our project grows you will see how this early commitment to organization
pays off.
You may have noticed that there is an internal prioritization to these files, based on
the order in which they are importedthis is to mitigate the possibility of a circular
import. A circular import occurs when two modules mutually import each other and,
hence, cannot be imported at all. When using the Flask framework, it is very easy to
create circular imports because so many different things depend on the central app
object. To avoid problems, some people just put everything into a single module.
This works fine for smaller apps, but is not maintainable beyond a certain size or
complexity. That is why we have broken our app into several modules and created a
single entry-point that controls the ordering of imports.

[ 18 ]

Chapter 1

The import flow

Execution starts when you run python main.py from the command line. The first
line of code that the Python interpreter runs into imports the app object from the app
module. Now we're inside app.py, which imports Flask and our Configuration
object. The rest of the app.py module is read and interpreted, and we're back into
main.py again. The second line of main.py imports the views module. Now we're
in views.py, which depends on app.py for @app.route and is, in fact, already
available from main.py. The URL route and view are registered as the views module
is interpreted, and we're back into main.py again. Since we are running main.py
directly, the 'if' check will evaluate to True and our app will run.

Import flow when executing main.py

[ 19 ]

Creating Your First Flask Application

Summary
By now you should be familiar with the process of setting up a new virtualenv for
your Python project, be able to install Flask, and have created a simple app. In this
chapter,we discussed how to create virtualenvs for your projects and install
third-party packages using pip. We also learnt how to write a basic Flask app, route
requests to views, and to read request arguments. We familiarized ourselves with
the interactive debugger and with how the Python interpreter processes the
import statements.
If you were already familiar with most of the subject-matter in this chapter, do not
worry; things will soon get more challenging.
In the next chapter, you will discover how to work with a relational database to
store and retrieve blog entries. We'll add a new module to our project for storing
our database-specific code and create some models to represent blog entries and
tags. Once we are able to store the entries, we will learn how to read them back in a
variety of ways through filtering, sorting, and aggregation. For more information,
you can refer to the following links:

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0333/

https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonDecorators
http://charlesleifer.com

[ 20 ]

Get more information Learning Flask Framework

Where to buy this book

You can buy Learning Flask Framework from the Packt Publishing website.
Alternatively, you can buy the book from Amazon, BN.com, Computer Manuals and most internet
book retailers.
Click here for ordering and shipping details.

www.PacktPub.com

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