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Building the Meilix Generator with Flask

Meilix Generator is a webapp which is used to trigger the Travis build of Meilix and mail the user the link of the iso. Meilix Generator webapp is based on Flask. This blog shows that how easy is to build a webapp and take the HTML files to render it into the webapp as well as to call and pass various function. Here I used Flask, the Python framework to render the HTML templates and send requests for various purposes (mentioned later in the article) without coding everything from scratch because of import facility of the Flask.

What is Flask?

Flask is a Python micro web framework based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 template engine. It is used as the backbone of the webapp. It features us with a whole set of Python from which we can easily generate webapp. It is micro as it has no tools and no library itself. It come up with minimum requirements and one who needs can import different library and use it. And I used several import function for Meilix Generator like render_template, send_from_directory, etc.

Implementation (The use case in Meilix Generator)

First of all, the installation process: We will do the installation in a virtual environment. We prefer virtual environment to differentiate the Python working environment since few programs are there which require different Python versions to work.
Install virtual environment 

sudo pip install virtualenv

Now go to the folder (project) and activate it using

. venv/bin/activate

Now install Flask

pip install flask
Creating your project

Now it’s time to create a simple project in the directory.
Let’s use HTML as the frontend. In the folder create styles.css for styling and index.html template for the frontend of the page.We will make one app.py file which would look similar to this: 

from flask import Flask, render_template
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/')
def index():
	"""Index page"""
	return render_template("index.html")
if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()

Flask looks for the / (root) path and here the root return the main template (index.html) which is the main function.

Compiling it to view the page:

export FLASK_DEBUG=1 FLASK_APP=app.py
flask run

You will find your page at http://127.0.0.1:5000

More options (how more it can help you)

  • Add more HTML template options and refer it in app.py
  • Easily use Github API  from a different .py file (this file should get import to app.py) to fetch data like: https://api.github.com/users/user_name : It will fetch user name, repos, followers and many more important information.

How I used this idea for FOSSASIA (Meilix Generator)

I used Flask for the backbone of project Meilix Generator. First, I used from function to import various library needed for the project and then made several functions for the same. Let’s understand the concept using few example:

from flask import Flask, render_template
@app.route('/about')
def about():
		#About page
		return render_template("about.html")

or

from flask import Flask, send_from_directory
@app.route('/uploads/<filename>')
def uploaded_file(filename):
		return send_from_directory(app.config['UPLOAD_FOLDER'],filename)

For more details file app.py can be found here of the Meilix Generator repository where we used the above idea.

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