How to embed a Dash app into an existing Flask app

Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash

Dash (by Plotly) is an open source, simple-to-use Python framework for building beautiful data-driven web applications.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the framework, head over to “Introducing Dash”, the official release announcement, or check out the many examples from their gallery.

What’s relevant though is that Dash uses Flask for the back end.

If you’re familiar with Flask, you will know that it has a minimalistic core, it’s highly customizable and comes with easy-to-add extensions.

And so, it’s only natural to think that Dash apps should be easy to integrate into an existing Flask app.

Table of Contents

• Existing solutions
• A self-contained example
• Factor out the Dash app into its own subfolder
• Multiple Dash apps on a single Flask server
• Deploy to Heroku
• Outstanding points
• Notes on setup, direnv and virtualenvwrapper
• Log of updates

Existing solutions