Flask Web Development

Chapter 2. Basic Application Structure

In this chapter, you will learn about the different parts of a Flask application. You will also write and run your first Flask web application.

Initialization

All Flask applications must create an application instance. The web server passes all requests it receives from clients to this object for handling, using a protocol called Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI). The application instance is an object of class Flask, usually created as follows:

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

The only required argument to the Flask class constructor is the name of the main module or package of the application. For most applications, Python’s __name__ variable is the correct value.

Tip

The name argument that is passed to the Flask application constructor is a source of confusion among new Flask developers. Flask uses this argument to determine the root path of the application so that it later can find resource files relative to the location of the application.

Later you will see more complex examples of application initialization, but for simple applications this is all that is needed.

Routes and View Functions

Clients such as web browsers send requests to the web server, which in turn sends them to the Flask application instance. The application instance needs to know what code needs to run for each URL requested, so it keeps a mapping of URLs to Python functions. The association between a URL and the function that handles it is called a route.

The most ...