Step 2: Application Setup Code¶
Next, we will create the application module,
flaskr.py. Just like the
schema.sql file you created in the previous step, this file should be
placed inside of the
For this tutorial, all the Python code we use will be put into this file
(except for one line in
__init__.py, and any testing or optional files you
decide to create).
The first several lines of code in the application module are the needed import statements. After that there will be a few lines of configuration code.
For small applications like
flaskr, it is possible to drop the configuration
directly into the module. However, a cleaner solution is to create a separate
.py file, load that, and import the values from there.
Here are the import statements (in
import os import sqlite3 from flask import (Flask, request, session, g, redirect, url_for, abort, render_template, flash)
The next couple lines will create the actual application instance and
initialize it with the config from the same file in
app = Flask(__name__) # create the application instance :) app.config.from_object(__name__) # load config from this file , flaskr.py # Load default config and override config from an environment variable app.config.update( DATABASE=os.path.join(app.root_path, 'flaskr.db'), SECRET_KEY=b'_5#y2L"F4Q8z\n\xec]/', USERNAME='admin', PASSWORD='default' ) app.config.from_envvar('FLASKR_SETTINGS', silent=True)
In the above code, the
Config object works similarly to a
dictionary, so it can be updated with new values.
Operating systems know the concept of a current working directory for each process. Unfortunately, you cannot depend on this in web applications because you might have more than one application in the same process.
For this reason the
app.root_path attribute can be used to
get the path to the application. Together with the
files can then easily be found. In this example, we place the
database right next to it.
For a real-world application, it’s recommended to use Instance Folders instead.
Usually, it is a good idea to load a separate, environment-specific
configuration file. Flask allows you to import multiple configurations and it
will use the setting defined in the last import. This enables robust
from_envvar() can help achieve
If you want to do this (not required for this tutorial) simply define the
FLASKR_SETTINGS that points to a config file
to be loaded. The silent switch just tells Flask to not complain if no such
environment key is set.
In addition to that, you can use the
method on the config object and provide it with an import name of a
module. Flask will then initialize the variable from that module. Note
that in all cases, only variable names that are uppercase are considered.
SECRET_KEY is needed to keep the client-side sessions secure.
Choose that key wisely and as hard to guess and complex as possible.
Lastly, add a method that allows for easy connections to the specified database.
def connect_db(): """Connects to the specific database.""" rv = sqlite3.connect(app.config['DATABASE']) rv.row_factory = sqlite3.Row return rv
This can be used to open a connection on request and also from the
interactive Python shell or a script. This will come in handy later.
You can create a simple database connection through SQLite and then tell
it to use the
sqlite3.Row object to represent rows. This allows
the rows to be treated as if they were dictionaries instead of tuples.
In the next section you will see how to run the application.
Continue with Step 3: Installing flaskr as a Package.