Book Image

Mastering Flask

By : Jack Stouffer
Book Image

Mastering Flask

By: Jack Stouffer

Overview of this book

Starting from a simple Flask app, this book will walk through advanced topics while providing practical examples of the lessons learned. After building a simple Flask app, a proper app structure is demonstrated by transforming the app to use a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. With a scalable structure in hand, the next chapters use Flask extensions to provide extra functionality to the app, including user login and registration, NoSQL querying, a REST API, an admin interface, and more. Next, you’ll discover how to use unit testing to take the guesswork away from making sure the code is performing as it should. The book closes with a discussion of the different platforms that are available to deploy a Flask app on, the pros and cons of each one, and how to deploy on each one.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering Flask
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Our first model


You may have noted that we did not actually create any tables in our database to abstract off of. This is because SQLAlchemy allows us to create either models from tables or tables from our models. This will be covered after we create the first model.

In our main.py file, SQLAlchemy must first be initialized with our app as follows:

from flask.ext.sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config.from_object(DevConfig)
db = SQLAlchemy(app)

SQLAlchemy will read our app's configuration and automatically connect to our database. Let's create a User model to interact with a user table in the main.py file:

class User(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer(), primary_key=True)
    username = db.Column(db.String(255))
    password = db.Column(db.String(255))

    def __init__(self, username):
        self.username = username

    def __repr__(self):
        return "<User '{}'>".format(self.username)

What have we accomplished? We now have a model that is based on...