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

Setting up a RESTful Flask API


In our app, we will create a RESTful interface to the blog post data in our database. The representations of the data will be sent as JSON. The data will be retrieved and modified using the general form in the preceding table, but the URI will be /api/posts.

We could just use the standard Flask views to create the API, but the Flask extension Flask Restful makes the task much easier.

To install Flask Restful:

$ pip install Flask-Restful

In the extensions.py file, initialize the Api object that will handle all the routes:

from flask.ext.restful import Api
…
rest_api = Api()

The control logic and views for our Post API should be stored in a new folder named rest in the controllers folder. In this folder, we will need an empty __init__.py and a file named post.py. Inside post.py, let's create a simpleHello World example:

from flask.ext.restful import Resource

class PostApi(Resource):
    def get(self):
        return {'hello': 'world'}

In Flask Restful, every REST...