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)

Flask WTForms

Adding forms to your application seems to be an easy task, but when you start coding the server-side code, the task of validating user input grows bigger and bigger as the form becomes more complex. Security is paramount, as the data is from an untrustworthy source, and is going to be entered into the database. WTForms is a library that handles server form validation for you by checking input against common form types. Flask WTForms is a Flask extension that is built on top of WTForms that adds features, such as Jinja HTML rendering, and protects you against attacks, such as SQL injection and cross-site request forgery. This extension is already installed in your virtualenv, because it's declared in the requirements.txt file.

Protecting yourself against SQL injection and cross-site request forgery is extremely important, as these are the most common forms of...