Step 3: Installing flaskr with setuptools¶

Flask is now shipped with built-in support for Click. Click provides Flask with enhanced and extensible command line utilities. Later in this tutorial you will see exactly how to extend the flask command line interface (CLI).

A useful pattern to manage a Flask application is to install your app using setuptools. This involves creating a setup.py in the projects root directory. You also need to add an empty __init__.py file to make the flaskr/flaskr directory a package. The code structure at this point should be:

/flaskr
    /flaskr
        __init__.py
        /static
        /templates
    setup.py

The content of the setup.py file for flaskr is:

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name='flaskr',
    packages=['flaskr'],
    include_package_data=True,
    install_requires=[
        'flask',
    ],
)

When using setuptools, it is also necessary to specify any special files that should be included in your package (in the MANIFEST.in). In this case, the static and templates directories need to be included, as well as the schema. Create the MANIFEST.in and add the following lines:

graft flaskr/templates
graft flaskr/static
include flaskr/schema.sql

At this point you should be able to install the application. As usual, it is recommended to install your Flask application within a virtualenv. With that said, go ahead and install the application with:

pip install --editable .

With that out of the way, you should be able to start up the application. Do this with the following commands:

export FLASK_APP=flaskr.flaskr
export FLASK_DEBUG=1
flask run

(In case you are on Windows you need to use set instead of export). The FLASK_DEBUG flag enables or disables the interactive debugger. Never leave debug mode activated in a production system, because it will allow users to execute code on the server!

You will see a message telling you that server has started along with the address at which you can access it.

When you head over to the server in your browser, you will get a 404 error because we don’t have any views yet. That will be addressed a little later, but first, you should get the database working.

Continue with Step 4: Database Connections.