In order to develop and debug locally, we need to be able to run the application. However, at the moment, this is not possible as MySQL is only installed on our VPS. There are three main options to develop our database application locally:
Connecting to the database on our VPS even when running Flask on our local machine
Installing MySQL on our local machine
Creating a "mock" of our database in memory using Python
While any could work, we'll go with the third option. Connecting to our production database would cause us to be affected by latency if we develop in a location far from our VPS, and this would also mean that we'd run test code against our production database, which is never a good idea. The second option would limit the portability of our development environment, increase setup time if we switch to a new development environment, and in the worst case scenario, use up a significant amount of local resources.