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.

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Mastering Flask
Jack Stouffer
Sep, 2015 | 288 pages
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Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering Flask
Mastering Flask
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started
Getting Started
Version control with Git
Python package management with pip
Dependency sandboxing with virtualenv
The beginning of our project
Summary
2
Creating Models with SQLAlchemy
Creating Models with SQLAlchemy
Setting up SQLAlchemy
Our first model
CRUD
Relationships between models
The convenience of SQLAlchemy sessions
Database migrations with Alembic
Summary
3
Creating Views with Templates
Creating Views with Templates
Jinja's syntax
Creating our views
Flask WTForms
Summary
4
Creating Controllers with Blueprints
Creating Controllers with Blueprints
Request setup, teardown, and application globals
Error pages
Class-based views
Blueprints
Summary
5
Advanced Application Structure
Advanced Application Structure
The project as a module
Application factories
Summary
6
Securing Your App
Securing Your App
Setting up
Using the session
Flask Login
Summary
7
Using NoSQL with Flask
Using NoSQL with Flask
Types of NoSQL databases
RDBMS versus NoSQL
MongoDB in Flask
Leveraging the power of NoSQL
Summary
8
Building RESTful APIs
Building RESTful APIs
What is REST
Setting up a RESTful Flask API
GET requests
POST requests
PUT requests
DELETE requests
Summary
9
Creating Asynchronous Tasks with Celery
Creating Asynchronous Tasks with Celery
What is Celery?
Setting up Celery and RabbitMQ
Creating tasks in Celery
Running Celery tasks
Monitoring Celery
Creating a reminder app
Creating a weekly digest
Summary
10
Useful Flask Extensions
Useful Flask Extensions
Flask Script
Flask Debug Toolbar
Flask Cache
Flask Assets
Flask Admin
Flask Mail
Summary
11
Building Your Own Extension
Building Your Own Extension
Creating a YouTube Flask extension
Modifying the response with Flask extensions
Summary
12
Testing Flask Apps
Testing Flask Apps
What are unit tests?
How does testing work?
Unit testing the application
User interface testing
Test coverage
Test-driven development
Summary
13
Deploying Flask Apps
Deploying Flask Apps
Deploying on your own server
Deploying on Heroku
Deploying on Amazon web services
Summary
Index
Index

Creating our views

To get started, we need to create a new folder named templates, in our project directory. This folder will store all of our Jinja files, which are just HTML files with Jinja syntax mixed in. Our first template will be our home page, which will be a list of the first 10 posts with summaries. There will also be a view for a post that will just show the post content, comments on the page, links to the author user page, and links to tag pages. There will also be user and tag pages that show all the posts by a user and all the posts with a specific tag. Each page will also have a sidebar showing the five most recent posts and the top five most used tags.

The view function

Because each page will have the same sidebar information, we can break that into a separate function to simplify our code. In the main.py file, add the following code:

from sqlalchemy import func
...
def sidebar_data():
    recent = Post.query.order_by(
        Post.publish_date.desc()
    ).limit(5).all()
 ...
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