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)

Unit testing the application

Unit testing in Python works by combining assert statements into their own functions inside a class. This collection of testing functions inside the class is called a test case. Each function inside the test case should test only one thing, which is the main idea behind unit testing. Testing only one thing in your unit tests forces you to verify each piece of code individually, and not gloss over any of the functionality of your code. If you write your unit tests correctly, you will end up with lots and lots of them. While this may seem overly verbose, it will save you from headaches further down the road.

In this configuration, we will use SQLLite in the memory engine database, which allows us to guarantee that the tests will not interfere with our actual database. Also, the configuration disables WTForms' CSRF checks, to allow us to submit forms...