Getting Started with Flask

Flask is a lightweight python web framework and it depends on the jinja template engine and Werkzeug WZGI tool kit.

It was originally designed and developed by an Austrian open source software programmer Armin Ronacher as an April fools day joke in 2010.

It is considered to be more pythonic than Django web framework because it is lighter and more explicit. Trust me if you’re new to web development but not to python, Flask will be very easy for you because you will feel as though you’re working with vanilla python.

Now let’s get started. In the next few minutes, you will have created your first web application in flask

Create a directory where your flask project will be hosted using the command below

mkdir my_flask_app

Inside your Directory, create another directory

mkdir flaskr
cd flaskr

Inside the flaskr directory create an init file

touch __init__.py

Create a virtual environment. The purpose of the virtual environment is to create an isolated environment for python projects. You can read more about virtual environments here.

If you do not have a virtual environment installed, in your terminal just run the command below

pip install virtualenv

Now that you have a virtual environment on your local machine, use the command below to set it up in your project

virtualenv venv

Activate the virtual environment using the command below

source venv/Scripts/activate --- if you're using windows
or
source venv/bin/activate --- if you're using linux

With your virtual environment activated Install flask using the command below

pip install flask

Now inside your init file in the flaskr directory, write these lines of code

from flask import Flask
def create_app(test_config=None):
   app = (__name__)
   @app.route('/')
   def index():
     return "Hello there I can run"
   return app

Now you’re almost 100% done 💪

Next in your terminal run the following commands

export FLASK_APP=flaskr
export FLASK_ENV=development
flask run

By now your server should be running and I’m pretty sure it’s running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/.

Congrats you’ve built your first web app using flask