19. URL Route Registrations¶

Generally there are three ways to define rules for the routing system:

1. You can use the flask.Flask.route() decorator.
2. You can use the flask.Flask.add_url_rule() function.
3. You can directly access the underlying Werkzeug routing system which is exposed as flask.Flask.url_map.

Variable parts in the route can be specified with angular brackets (/user/<username>). By default a variable part in the URL accepts any string without a slash however a different converter can be specified as well by using <converter:name>.

Variable parts are passed to the view function as keyword arguments.

The following converters are available:

Custom converters can be defined using flask.Flask.url_map.

Here are some examples:

@app.route('/')
def index():
    pass

@app.route('/<username>')
def show_user(username):
    pass

@app.route('/post/<int:post_id>')
def show_post(post_id):
    pass

An important detail to keep in mind is how Flask deals with trailing slashes. The idea is to keep each URL unique so the following rules apply:

1. If a rule ends with a slash and is requested without a slash by the user, the user is automatically redirected to the same page with a trailing slash attached.
2. If a rule does not end with a trailing slash and the user requests the page with a trailing slash, a 404 not found is raised.

This is consistent with how web servers deal with static files. This also makes it possible to use relative link targets safely.

You can also define multiple rules for the same function. They have to be unique however. Defaults can also be specified. Here for example is a definition for a URL that accepts an optional page:

@app.route('/users/', defaults={'page': 1})
@app.route('/users/page/<int:page>')
def show_users(page):
    pass

This specifies that /users/ will be the URL for page one and /users/page/N will be the URL for page N.

Here are the parameters that route() and add_url_rule() accept. The only difference is that with the route parameter the view function is defined with the decorator instead of the view_func parameter.