Book Image

Mastering Flask Web Development - Second Edition

By : Daniel Gaspar, Jack Stouffer
Book Image

Mastering Flask Web Development - Second Edition

By: Daniel Gaspar, Jack Stouffer

Overview of this book

Flask is a popular Python framework known for its lightweight and modular design. Mastering Flask Web Development will take you on a complete tour of the Flask environment and teach you how to build a production-ready application. You'll begin by learning about the installation of Flask and basic concepts such as MVC and accessing a database using an ORM. You will learn how to structure your application so that it can scale to any size with the help of Flask Blueprints. You'll then learn how to use Jinja2 templates with a high level of expertise. You will also learn how to develop with SQL or NoSQL databases, and how to develop REST APIs and JWT authentication. Next, you'll move on to build role-based access security and authentication using LDAP, OAuth, OpenID, and database. Also learn how to create asynchronous tasks that can scale to any load using Celery and RabbitMQ or Redis. You will also be introduced to a wide range of Flask extensions to leverage technologies such as cache, localization, and debugging. You will learn how to build your own Flask extensions, how to write tests, and how to get test coverage reports. Finally, you will learn how to deploy your application on Heroku and AWS using various technologies, such as Docker, CloudFormation, and Elastic Beanstalk, and will also learn how to develop Jenkins pipelines to build, test, and deploy applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Testing Flask Apps

Throughout the book, every time that we've made a modification to our application's code, we've had to manually load the affected web pages into our browser to test if the code was working correctly. As the application grows, this process becomes more and more tedious, especially if you change something that is low-level and used everywhere, such as SQLAlchemy model code.

In order to automate the process of verifying that our code works the way we want it to, we will use a built-in feature of Python that allows us to write tests, normally named unit tests or integration tests, which are checked against our application's code.

In this chapter, you will learn how to do the following:

  • Writing simple tests with Python's unitest library
  • Testing security, and validating logins and role based access
  • Writing a test for a REST API
  • Testing your...