Build the first Flask Python web app framework
When developing a web app in Python, chances are you’re leveraging a framework. There are a number of frameworks for Python, from which we will now learn Flask. This article will be your complete definitive guide for developing fully functional websites with the Flask web framework.
Breakdown of this Article:
1) Install flask
2) Create a Machine Learning Model
3) Saving Machine Learning Model
4) Creating an API using Flask
5) Create a front-end application
6) Hosting on the personal server
Environment setup
Flask is a web framework which provides us with tools, libraries and technologies that allow us to build a web application. This web application can be any web pages or a blog or go as large as a commercial website.
In Anaconda Distribution install Flask:
pip install flask
Explanation of Data Flow using Flask
Steps to be taken:
1) Train the Machine Learning Model
2) Save the trained machine learning model object as a pickle file (serialization)
3) Build a flask environment that will have an API endpoint which would encapsulate our trained machine learning model and enable it to receive inputs (features) through GET requests over HTTP/HTTPS and then return the output after de-serializing the earlier serialized model
4) Upload the flask script along with the trained Machine Learning Model
5) Make requests to the hosted flask script through a website or any other application capable of sending HTTP/HTTPS requests
Machine Learning Model
Train our Machine Learning Model
Create a Python file model.py
Here, after running the above code, a file called “model.pkl” is created using dump which is the trained machine learning model that can be transferred anywhere and used after de-serialization as given using load.
Flask setup
Let’s first set up the flask server on the local host and later deploy it on python.
The following script starts the flask server on localhost and default port (5000) making the URL: http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (http://127.0.0.1:5000/)
In-App Route app.route decorator is used for specifying the flask app route over the web.
- “/” simply means the home that is “http://127.0.0.1:5000/” (http://127.0.0.1:5000/”)
- 2) “/predict/” means http://127.0.0.1:5000/predict/ (http://127.0.0.1:5000/predict/)
Routing
After initializing the app.py file, we have to tell the Flask what we want to do after the web page loads. The python code @app.route(“/”, methods = [“GET”,” POST”]) tells the Flask what to do when we load the home page of the website. In methods: GET method is the type of request our web browser will send to the website when it accesses the URL of the web page. Don’t worry about the POST method as it doesn’t have much relevance for us in this deployment process.
Setting up the HTML file
Save model.py, app.py and index.html
Copy the URL http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (http://127.0.0.1:5000/) and paste it into your browser
After a few secs, this would be shown in the browser.
Input Data into different Categories
Then Press Predict button
You can see that we Predicted our profit and notice that the URL of the page changed to http://127.0.0.1:5000/predict (http://127.0.0.1:5000/predict).
This is my first article hope you like it and the Github link for all the files is in this link: https://github.com/chiragsamal/flask_tutorial
