nitish6174 / starter_flask_app

Base setup for developing a flask application

Starter flask app

This repo serves as the base setup for developing your flask application, with some of the best practices and easy-to-scale code structure.

Features

• Create views with re-usable Jinja templates
• CSS & JS bundles defined to enable loading only the required files page-wise
• Easy to configure/enable the following:
  • MongoDB connection and querying
  • Uploading & downloading of static files
• Gzip compression
• CSS, JS minification

Note : Tested with Python 3.6

Setting up project

1. Clone the repo

2. Create virtual environment for the project and install pip dependencies

   cd starter_flask_app
   virtualenv -p python3 venv
   # Source the virtual env
   # zsh/fish users need to use activate.zsh/activate.fish files instead
   source venv/bin/activate
   pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the server

python run.py

Supported arguments:

• --host : To set the app host (defaults to 0.0.0.0)
• --port : To set the app port (defaults to 5000)
• --debug : Pass this flag to enable debugging

Now open http://localhost:5000 in your browser to view the app.

Developing your app from the base code

• Enabling mongo:
  • Set the appropriate constants in flaskapp/config.py
  • Uncomment the mentioned line in flaskapp/app.py
• Enabling static file downloading:
  • Set the variable DOWNLOADS_DIR in flaskapp/config.py
  • Uncomment the mentioned function in flaskapp/app.py
  • Modify the route in this function as appropriate.
• Define templates for your pages in flaskapp/templates/ dir.
  See home.html for reference which inherits the basic structure from layout.html and just defines the required parts.
• Define route for the pages in flaskapp/routes/view_routes.py
• Define API related routes in flaskapp/routes/api_routes.py
• Add the CSS & JS files in flaskapp/static/ in appropriate subdir.
  Then, define the suitable bundle page-wise in flaskapp/assets.py.
  Refer the existing bundles in the file.