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Tag: Database

Adding an API to your Flask project

Introduction:

This post is part 1 of a 3 part series. I’m going to walk through setting up a Flask API project, adding a React frontend to the project and then adding some data visualization to the React frontend.

If you’ve seen any of my previous blog posts, I’ve discussed setting up SQL databases, using Redis databases, setting up dashboard applications – so the next natural step would be to discuss displaying some of this data I’ve ben hoarding.

Here are the other chapters:

  1. Adding an API to your Flask project.
  2. Adding a React frontend to your Flask project (this section).
  3. Adding data visualization to your Flask app with React Victory charts.

Flask is great for creating server side applications and API projects.

In this blog post, I’m going to discuss some of the basic principals of adding an API to an existing Flask project. As most people who are familiar with Flask, are already familiar with Miguel Grinbergs microblog application, I’ve cloned his project repository we will add an API endpoint to it.

Flask large application structure:

Here’s the project structure for a large Flask application (this is Miguels’ microblog application).

For this project – we will be adding in the app/api_1_0 folder and associated code. We’ll also update the config.py to attach the API routes to our app.

|   config.py
|   microblog.py
|
+---app
    |   cli.py
    |   models.py
    |   __init__.py
    |
    +---api_1_0
    |       routes.py
    |       __init__.py
    |       load_junk_data.py
    |
    +---main
    |       forms.py
    |       routes.py
    |       __init__.py
    |
    +---static
    |       loading.gif
    |
    +---templates
        |   base.html
        |   index.html
        |   user.html
        |
        \---errors
             404.html
             500.html

Python data structures:

Let’s look at some Python dictionary data structures and I’ll show how I would add these to an SQL database. We’ll start off with a generic data structure.

Here we have a data structure (a Python dictionary), detailing information of some type of company. The Company dictionary contains a key “FINANCE”, which contains a list of Finance dictionaries.

{
    "BUSINESS_TYPE": "Manufacturing",
    "COMPANY": "Stark Industries",
    "COMPANY_CEO": "Pepper Potts",
    "FINANCE": [
        {
            "Q1_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q2_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q3_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q4_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "YEAR": 2018
        },
        {
            "Q1_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q2_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q3_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q4_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "YEAR": 2017
        },
        {
            "Q1_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q2_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q3_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q4_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "YEAR": 2016
        },
        {
            "Q1_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q2_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q3_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "Q4_EARNINGS": 7825000000.0,
            "YEAR": 2015
        }
    ]
}

Once we define the data structure, the next step for a Python developer would be looking at how to nest several Company dictionaries, inside another wrapper dictionary.

What use would our database be if we can only store 1 company – we want to be able to store data for a huge amount of companies – the more the better 🙂

{
    "DATA": [
        {
            "BUSINESS_TYPE": "Manufacturing",
            "COMPANY": "Stark Industries",
            "COMPANY_CEO": "Pepper Potts",
            "FINANCE": […
            ]
        },
        {
            "BUSINESS_TYPE": "Multinational Conglomerate",
            "COMPANY": "WayneCorp",
            "COMPANY_CEO": "Bruce Wayne",
            "FINANCE": [ …
            ]
        }
    ]
}

SQL Alchemy:

In SQL terms our Company dictionary is an example of a one-to-many relationship. 1 Company contains many Finance dictionaries.

One-to-many relationship.

Let’s look at how we would create this data structure with SQL Alchemy.

Creating the Company table:

The actual database connections are made in the config.py file – I’ve discussed this here before.

To add a database table, we create a class in the app/models.py file – we can then create instances of that class in our code.

I am loading the Python dictionaries via a function called load_junk_data – I wish I’d thought of a more professional name for this file but here we go:

app/models.py

class Company(db.Model):
    __tablename__ 	= 'company'
    id 			= db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    name 		= db.Column(db.String(140))
    company_ceo 	= db.Column(db.String(140))
    business_type 	= db.Column(db.String(140))
    finances 	= db.relationship('Finance', backref='finance', lazy='dynamic')
 
    def __repr__(self):
        return '<Company {}>'.format(self.name)

What is this code doing?:

  • We are creating a class object named “Company”:
    • The Company class inherits the properties of the db.Model parent class.
  • We are giving the class a table name of “company”.
    • The SQL table “company” will be created when db.create_all() is called in config.py
  • The “id” column will be the primary key.
  • We are defining a “finances” column, which is a database relationship type:
    • It has a back reference to the “finance” table (we will make this next).
    • Setting the parameter lazy=dynamic is a dynamic loader, this will return a Query object when we call the filter() function.

Adding the Company object:

Now that we have created the table – how do we populate the data? Let’s create an instance of the Company object and store it in our SQL database.

Creating an instance of the Company object:

app\api_1_0\load_junk_data.py

my_wayne_company = Company(
	name		= company_waynecorp["COMPANY"],
	company_ceo	= company_waynecorp["COMPANY_CEO"],
	business_type	= company_waynecorp["BUSINESS_TYPE"]
)

First we populate the “my_wayne_company” object from our Company dict.

Adding a Company item to the database:

Now we can add the object into the database.

db.session.add(my_wayne_company)
db.session.commit()

Adding the Finance object:

Now that we have saved a Company object – we need to create some Finance objects and attach the finance data to their respective companies. The Finance table will represent the “many” part of our one-to-many relationships.

Creating an instance of the Finance object:

app/models.py

class Finance(db.Model):
    __tablename__    = 'finance'
    id 	             = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    year 	     = db.Column(db.Integer, default=1999)
    q1_earnings      = db.Column(db.Float)
    q2_earnings      = db.Column(db.Float)
    q3_earnings      = db.Column(db.Float)
    q4_earnings      = db.Column(db.Float)
   company_id        = db.Column(db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('company.id'))
 
    def __repr__(self):
        return '<Finance {}>'.format(self.id)

What is this code doing?:

  • We are creating a Finance class object:
    • The Finance class inherits the properties of the db.Model parent class.
  • We are giving the class a table name of “finance”.
    • We have previously defined this reference in the Company tables’ “finances” column.
  • We are defining a “company_id” column, which is an integer type:
    • “company_id” is a also a foreign key referencing the “id” column of the “company” table.

Adding a list of Finance items to the database:

Each Company object will have many Finance objects attached to it.

We can can create 2 instances of the Finance object, in a similar way to how we created an instance of the Company objects.

app\api_1_0\load_junk_data.py

wayne_finance_y1 = Finance(
	year		= wayne_finance_y1["YEAR"],
	q1_earnings	= wayne_finance_y1["Q1_EARNINGS"],
	q2_earnings	= wayne_finance_y1["Q2_EARNINGS"],
	q3_earnings	= wayne_finance_y1["Q3_EARNINGS"],
	q4_earnings	= wayne_finance_y1["Q4_EARNINGS"]
)

wayne_finance_y2 = Finance(
	year		= wayne_finance_y2["YEAR"],
	q1_earnings	= wayne_finance_y2["Q1_EARNINGS"],
	q2_earnings	= wayne_finance_y2["Q2_EARNINGS"],
	q3_earnings	= wayne_finance_y2["Q3_EARNINGS"],
	q4_earnings	= wayne_finance_y2["Q4_EARNINGS"]
)

These Finance objects can be attached to the Company object – in a similar way to appending items to a list.

my_wayne_company.finances.append(wayne_finance_y1)
my_wayne_company.finances.append(wayne_finance_y2)

Bonus points: Attach a list of Finance objects directly to the Company object.

In the previous section we had a Company object and then attached some Finance objects to it.

What if we already had several Finance objects – before we realised we needed to create a Company table? (I came across this problem recently – and it took me a bit of time to figure a clean way to do it).

Let’s look at adding a list of Finance objects directly to a Company object.

First we can create a series of Finance objects, in the same way as before:

app\api_1_0\load_junk_data.py

stark_finance_y1 = Finance(
    year        = stark_finance_y1["YEAR"],
    q1_earnings = stark_finance_y1["Q1_EARNINGS"],
    q2_earnings = stark_finance_y1["Q2_EARNINGS"],
    q3_earnings = stark_finance_y1["Q3_EARNINGS"],
    q4_earnings = stark_finance_y1["Q4_EARNINGS"]
)
:
stark_finance_y4 = Finance(
    year        = stark_finance_y4["YEAR"],
    q1_earnings = stark_finance_y4["Q1_EARNINGS"],
    q2_earnings = stark_finance_y4["Q2_EARNINGS"],
    q3_earnings = stark_finance_y4["Q3_EARNINGS"],
    q4_earnings = stark_finance_y4["Q4_EARNINGS"]
)

With these 4 Finance objects created – we can create a list of Finance objects:

finance_list = [stark_finance_y1, stark_finance_y2, stark_finance_y3, stark_finance_y4]

Now that we have the finance_list created – we can create the Company object:

my_stark_company = Company(
    name            = stark_company["COMPANY"],
    company_ceo     = stark_company["COMPANY_CEO"],
    business_type   = stark_company["BUSINESS_TYPE"],
    finances        = finance_list
)

We can add the list of Finance objects directly into the object instantiation.

db.session.add(my_stark_company)
db.session.commit()

Finally, add them to the database.

Viewing our SQL data:

When you view your data in an SQL database browser you will see something like this – first let’s look at the “company” table:

Viewing the “company” table in the SQLite browser.

Above we can see there are 2 Company objects in our “company” table.

Next, let’s look at the “finance” table:

Viewing the “finance” table in the SQLite browser.

We can see there are now, 6 Finance objects stored in the “finance” table, the “company_id” column is the foreign ID , which references the respective Company ID of each Finance object.

SQL data browsers:

There are lots of programs you can use to view your SQL database:

(This is not an advertisement, let me know if you have any better suggestions)

(Also let me know if you want to advertise 😛 )

Blueprints.

Flask Blueprints provide a means to section off your application. They are used to organise your application into distinct components.

A common application pattern is to section your application into 3 distinct parts:

  1. Authorized endpoints:
    1. Returns a HTML page: Login required.
  2. Unauthorized endpoints:
    1. Returns a HTML page: Login not required.
  3. API endpoints:
    1. Returns a (usually) JSON response: Login can be required.

Adding Blueprints to your Flask project:

To use Blueprints in your app you need to first create the Blueprint and then attach it to your app.

Create Blueprint:

app/api_1_0/__init__.py

from flask import Blueprint
 
bp = Blueprint('api', __name__)
 
from app.api_1_0 import routes

What is this code doing?:

  • Importing Blueprint from the flask package.
  • Creating an instance of the Blueprint object.
  • Importing the API endpoints from the routes.py file in the api_1_0 folder.

Attach the Blueprint to your app:

app/__init__.py

def create_app(config_class=Config):
    app = Flask(__name__)
    # Rest of your config goes here:
 
    from app.api_1_0 import bp as api_bp
    app.register_blueprint(api_bp, url_prefix='/api_1_0')

What is this code doing?:

  • In the create_app function, (used to instantiate our application).
  • We register the api_bp Blueprint with the app context.
    • We’re adding a URL prefix of “/api_1_0” to this Blueprint.

Adding an API endpoint to a Flask app:

Create an API endpoint:

We’ve created the Blueprint – now lets create the api_1_0 routes file and our first API endpoint.

app/api_1_0/routes.py

First, import the Blueprint object:

from app.api_1_0 import bp

Now we can create the API endpoint:

@bp.route('/get_company/<int:id>')
@login_required
def get_company(id):
    c = Company.query.filter_by(id=id).first_or_404()
    message = "Welcome to the API :)"
    content = {
        "name"          : c.name,
        "ceo_name"      : c.company_ceo,
        "business type" : c.business_type
    }
    status_dict = {
        "status": 200,
        "success": True,
        "message": message,
        "contentType":'application/json',
        "content": content
    }
 
    return jsonify(status_dict), status_dict["status"]

What is this code doing?:

  • @bp.route(‘/get_company/<int:id>’)
    • This is the Blueprint decorator.
    • binds the route to our API blueprint.
    • The route takes a parameter, an integer called “id”
  • Login is required to access this route.
  • c = Company.query.filter_by(id=id).first_or_404()
    • We query the database, for the first item matching the id value.
    • If no items match – we return a 404 response.
    • The response from the SQLAlchemy query is stored in “c”
  • content = {}
    • We populate a dictionary object with the result of the query.
  • status_dict = {}
    • We populate a return response.
    • HTTP status code 200.
    • Success = True.
    • A meaningful success message in the response.
    • A contentType, to notify other applications we are returning a JSON resonse.
    • We populate the “content” key with the dictionary object from the database response.
  • return jsonify(status_dict), status_dict[“status”]
    • We convert the Python dict “status_dict” into a JSON object.
    • We return the status_dict JSON object and the the HTTP code.

Note: We’ve defined the route as “/get_company/id” but we’ve also added the prefix “/api_1_0” to the Blueprint – so the actual endpoint will be: /api_1_0/get_company/1 (for company ID 1).

Viewing the API respone:

With the server running, we can view the API JSON response in a web browser.

Note:

  • The API Blueprints URL’s are prepended with “/api_1_0”.
  • The Company ID “1” relates to WayneCorp.

Conclusion:

We looked at some Python data structures and turned these into a SQL relational data structure.

We have successfully created a Flask API, which will pull data from our database and return it as a JSON response.

We can now use this API to serve external applications or a Javascript frontend to our applications.

Resources:

Part 2 >

We’ll build on our Flask project by adding a React frontend.

Reusing Flask SQL Alchemy code between multiple applications

Introduction:

Flask and Flask SQL Alchemy have lots of cool functionality built into them, that a lot of developers probably weren’t even aware of. If you’ve followed any of the main Flask tutorials (such as Miguel Grinbergs amazing tutorial), you probably already have all of the necessary setup completed.

I’ll also be building this code off the Flask large application structure. So this will take care of creating my application configuration and database connections, in both development and production modes.

Let’s look at a common Flask use-case for creating a dashboard application:

  • You have a list of files (test results, for example).
  • You have some Python code that scrapes these files.
  • You want to create a Flask application to display these test results.
This is the basic structure of a Dashboard application.

Dashboard application structure:

This all seems pretty straight forward when you start to design your application. You design a working development environment. It’s looking pretty good, you spend some time adding custom CSS and JavaScript features.

Soon you realise, you’ve hit a roadblock:

  • My application is hosted in the cloud.
  • My database is hosted in (a different) the cloud.
  • My test results are split across several computers / servers.

Either way, it was easy to build your application in the development environment because the test results, web application and database were all on the same computer. You didn’t need to worry about getting access to the files, file permission, file sizes, long run times, etc…

Using the Flask app context:

You can invoke your Flask application with different contexts. Flask applications are normally used with the Request context – a web server waits for a GET request and sends a response.

The application context keeps track of the application-level data during a request, CLI command, or other activity. Rather than passing the application around to each function, the current_app and g proxies are accessed instead.

Read about the Flask application context here

Set your database free!:

Flask and SQL Alchemy allow you to separate your database from your Flask application.
If you’ve read any Flask / SQL Alchemy tutorials, you’ve probably heard the advice “don’t bind your SQLAlchemy object to the Flask application”. Binding your application to the Flask application, means you can only access the database through the Request context.
So in this case, we want to avoid binding our SQL Alchemy to the Request context – so we can use it in a custom context.

Don’t bind your SQL Alchemy object to the Flask application

def create_app(config_name):
    app = Flask(__name__)
    app.config.from_object(config[config_name])
    db = SQLAlchemy(app)

For example, you may have seen the above code in the SQL Alchemy quickstart guide. Let’s make some small changes.

Attach your SQL Alchemy object to your Flask application:

Instead of binding we can use the init_app function to attach the SQL Alchemy “db” object to our application

db = SQLAlchemy() 

def create_app(config_name):
    app = Flask(__name__)
    app.config.from_object(config[config_name])
    db.init_app(app)

Note:

  • Line 1: We are defining the SQL Alchemy object globally and attaching it to the application via the init_app function.
  • Line 6: The init_app function prepares the application to work with SQL Alchemy.
  • But it does not bind the SQL Alchemy object to your application!

What does init_app() do?

Flask SQL Alchemy is a “Flask extension“, a 3rd party library that has been designed to work with Flask.

init_app() is a common function, every Flask extension must provide, to initialise the extension to work with Flask.

Connecting to your database:

The development SQLite database is normally setup as below, usually defaulting to output to the “data-dev.sqlite” file (or you can even set up another external database).

class DevelopmentConfig(Config):
	DEBUG = True
	SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = os.environ.get('DEV_DATABASE_URL') or \
		'sqlite:///' + os.path.join(basedir, 'data-dev.sqlite')

Let’s set up our external production database, first set the environment variables:

set POSTGRES_USER=USERNAME
set POSTGRES_PASS=PASSWORD
set POSTGRES_HOST=123xxx.cloud.provider.com
set POSTGRES_PORT=1234
set POSTGRES_DB_NAME=DB_NAME

Note: I’m developing on Windows, so I set environment variables with the “set” command. You will need to use the correct command for your OS, for example: set, setenv or export.

In the config.py file, create a dict with the database details:

POSTGRES = {
	'user': os.environ.get('POSTGRES_USER'),
	'password': os.environ.get('POSTGRES_PASS'),
	'database': os.environ.get('POSTGRES_DB_NAME'),
	'host': os.environ.get('POSTGRES_HOST'),
	'port': os.environ.get('POSTGRES_PORT'),
}

Update the ProductionConfig class to use your parameters:

class ProductionConfig(Config):
	postgres_url = 'postgres://%(user)s:%(password)s@%(host)s:%(port)s/%(database)s' % POSTGRES
	SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = postgres_url or \
		'sqlite:///' + os.path.join(basedir, 'data.sqlite')

Accessing your database outside of the request context:

Now that we have correctly initialised out SQLAlchemy object:

  • We can access our database outside of the web servers Request context.
  • We don’t need to tie our code to a Request action.
  • Easily swap between production and development databases.

Let’s look at an example of how I would query my database for a list of all items stored in the Files table.

Creating the “Files” table:

Here is an example SQL Alchemy model I use for storing details of tracked Files.

models.py:

class Files(db.Model):
	__tablename__ = 'files'
	id	= db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
	created = db.Column(db.DateTime, nullable=False, index=True, default=datetime.utcnow)
	run_dir	= db.Column(db.String(256), nullable=False)
	file_path = db.Column(db.String(256), nullable=False)
	file_name = db.Column(db.String(128), nullable=False)
	full_name = db.Column(db.String(512), nullable=False)
	file_type = db.Column(db.String(10), nullable=False)
	file_size = db.Column(db.String(20), nullable=False)

Now that we have the Files table created, let’s query it using the Manager shell (You could also use Flask CLI).

Development database:

In our local development environment, using the Flask shell context, we can simply query the Files table like so.

(venv) [AllynH_dev] C:\example_app\>python manage.py shell
>>> files = Files.query.all()
>>> print("Found", len(files), "files")
Found 4 files
>>> job_queue = Queue.query.all()
>>> print("There are", len(job_queue), "queue items.")
There are 4 queue items.
Above: My development environment is tracking 4 files.

Note: I’m using Flask-Script manager but this also works with the Flask-CLI tool.

Production database:

To switch to production, we can simply change the FLASK_CONFIG environment variable and query the Files object, like so.

(venv) [AllynH_dev] C:\example_app\>set FLASK_CONFIG=production
(venv) [AllynH_dev] C:\example_app\>python manage.py shell
>>> files = Files.query.all()
>>> print("Found", len(files), "files")
Found 46716 files
>>> job_queue = Queue.query.all()
>>> print("There are", len(job_queue), "queue items.")
There are 15 queue items.
Above:  My production environment is tracking 46K files.

We can now see, we are pulling data directly from our production database.

We are also pulling data outside of the Request context – the Flask web server is not used, and we don’t need to wait for a GET request in order to execute the code.

Modifying the database contents:

Note: Obviously it’s not usually a great idea to modify production database contents from the Python interpreter, however, some times it can prevent you from having to drop the table and rebuilding the contents all over again.

Let’s look at an example of where I needed to remove old jobs from my schedulers Queue table, from the Flask shell interpreter.

Here is an example of a Queue object from my scheduler:

Let’s say for this example, that I pushed a fix to my code recently but I have a lot of jobs running in the queue that I want to run with the fixed code. In order to do this I need to delete these waiting jobs from the schedulers Queue.

First, I need to find a list of jobs in the Queue.

(venv) [AllynH_dev] C:\example_app\>python manage.py shell

>>> job_queue = Queue.query.all()
>>> print("There are", len(job_queue), "queue items.")
There are 15 queue items.

Now let’s delete the problem items:

>>> from datetime import datetime, timedelta
>>> for q in job_queue:
...     later = datetime.now() + timedelta(hours=10)
...     if q.time_to_live > later:
...             db.session.delete(q)
...
>>> db.session.commit()
>>> job_queue = Queue.query.all()
>>> print("There are", len(job_queue), "queue items.")
There are 7 queue items.

In this case – any Queue item with a time_to_live value of > 10 hours from now will be deleted.

Now that we can successively access, read and modify the production database through the Python interpreter – the next step is to actually create a standalone script to handle the file parsing and database connections.

Creating the database engine:

In the diagram below, each of the servers are connected to the web application via a file called “DB engine”, let’s have a look at how to create this file.

Dashboard application structure:

Using what we know about app context and adding the database to the application, we can now create a new file, called “db_engine.py”:

/yourapplication
    config.py
    db_engine.py
    /app
        __init__.py
        views.py
        models.py
        /static
            style.css
        /templates
            layout.html
            index.html
            login.html

To access our SQL Alchemy database:

  • We can import the create_app function.
  • We can also import the Flask database models.
  • When executing create_app, we push the app context to our db_engine app.

db_engine.py:

from app import create_app, db
from app.models import Users, Files, Queue # etc...:

create_app('production').app_context().push()

Note: The ‘production’ parameter can also be set to ‘development’ or ‘testing’ or any other configuration in your app. I normally set this via a command line argument.

We can now Query items from the database:

db_engine.py:

# code to open and parse files, etc.:
my_queue = Queue.query.all()
For queue in my_queue:
    output = parse_log_file(queue.run_dir, queue.owner, queue.run_tag, queue.user_tag)

Note: the parse_log_file function parses the file and returns some test results, implementation will depend on what you want to do.

We can also add items to the database:

db_engine.py:

# Add runs to the Queue database.:
add_run = Queue(
    time_to_live    = datetime.utcnow() + timedelta(hours=24))
    run_dir         = my_file[‘RUN_DIR'],
    owner           = my_file[‘OWNER'],
    site            = my_file['SITE'],
    host            = my_file['HOST_MACHINE'],
    run_tag         = my_file.get('run_tag', 'Development'),
    user_tag        = my_file.get('user_tag', ''),
    time_to_live    = datetime.utcnow() + timedelta(hours=24)
)

db.session.add(add_run)
db.session.commit()

Here I add an item to the task queue, these items are processed by a cron job that runs every 15 minutes.

Setting parameters with argparse :

In the code above, the create_app() function was hardcoded to ‘production’, in my case I use argparse to set this value with a command line argument.

db_engine.py:

parser.add_argument("-p", "--production", action="store_true",
					help="Select production server.")
args = parser.parse_args()

# Set user defined input options:
def parse_arguments():
	if args.production:
		# Create app:
		create_app('production').app_context().push()
	else:
		# Create app:
		create_app(os.getenv('FLASK_CONFIG') or 'default').app_context().push()

For more information on argparse, see here. See here for an example of how I use it in my automation code.

Executing the code:

As mentioned above, you can use the same code base for running the web server or the database engine. The app context controls how the application is run.

Running the web server:

When running the Flask webserver you’d use:

python manage.py runserver

Or, if you were using Flask CLI:

flask run

Or, if you were using gunicorn, something like this:

web: gunicorn --workers 4 manage:app

Running the database engine:

When running the database engine – you can do something like this:

# Run Engine in production mode - add schedule file:
python db_engine.py --schedule_file ..\Engine\queue_file.json --production

In my case, the schedule file is a list of files containing test results, that I want added to the database. These parameters are defined with argparse and can be whatever you need.

Conclusion:

To summarise, Flask and SQL Alchemy can do a lot of powerful stuff, with very little changes to your core code base.

  • We can now push data from multiple servers to our database.
  • We can reuse the Flask models and database structure, outside of the web application.
  • Don’t need to write custom database code, so our applications will never be out of sync.
  • The same code base can be used to run our web server or the db_engine – the code runs with different context.

If you’ve built your app structure following some of the main Flask tutorials – you may not even have to make changes to your code base.

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