Handling basic configurations

In Flask, a configuration is done on an attribute named config of the Flask object. The config attribute is a subclass of the dictionary data type, and we can modify it just like any dictionary.

For instance, to run our application in the debug mode, we can write the following:

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['DEBUG'] = True

app.debug = True

app.run(debug=True)

There are a bunch of configuration values provided by Flask. We will come across them in the relevant recipes.

As the application grows larger, there originates a need to manage the application's configuration in a separate file as shown here. Being specific to machine-based setups in most cases will most probably not be a part of the version-control system. For this, Flask provides us with multiple ways to fetch configurations. The most frequently used ones are discussed here:

Flask is intelligent enough to pick up only those configuration variables that are written in uppercase. This allows us to define any local variables in our configuration files/objects and leave the rest to Flask.

app = Flask(__name__)
DEBUG = True
TESTING = True
app.config.from_object(__name__)
app.config.from_pyfile('/path/to/config/file')