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)

User interface testing

In order to test the high level of our application's code and to create system tests, we will write tests that work with browsers, and verify that the UI code is functioning properly. Using a tool called Selenium, we will create Python code that hooks into a browser and controls it purely from code. This works by finding elements on the screen, and then performing actions on those elements through Selenium. Click on it or input keystrokes. Also, Selenium allows you to perform checks on the page content by giving you access to the elements' content, such as their attributes and inner text. For more advanced checks, Selenium even has an interface which can run arbitrary JavaScript on the page. If the JavaScript returns a value, it is automatically converted into a Python type.

Before we touch the code, Selenium needs to be installed. Make sure you...