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)

Advanced Application Structure

Our application has gone from a very simple example to an extendable foundation on which powerful features can easily be built. However, having our application entirely reside in one file needlessly clutters our code. This is one of the advantages of Flask; you can write a small REST service or web application on a single file, or a full-blown enterprise application. The framework won't get in your way and won't impose any project layout.

To make the application code clearer and more comprehensible, we will transform the entire code into a Python module and each feature into a module by itself. This modular approach enables you to scale easily and in a predictable way, so new features will have an obvious place and structure. In this chapter, you will learn the best practices for the following:

  • Creating a modular application that easily...