flask-boilerplate

Flask boilerplate code

I didn't really like the Flask starter projects I found searching the web. I really like Flask and I use it for quite a few projects so I decided to make a clean, readable, documented starter project. I didn't include any makefile or fabric as I feel it imposes a choice to the user of this project, I rather keep things simple (even though the word is subject to interpretation).

Features

• User account sign up, sign in, password reset, all through asynchronous email confirmation.
• Form generation.
• Error handling.
• HTML macros and layout file.
• "Functional" file structure.
• Python 3.x compliant.
• Asynchronous AJAX calls.
• Application factory.
• Administration panel.
• Static file bundling, automatic SCSS to CSS conversion and automatic minifying.
• Websockets (for example for live chatting)
• Virtual environment example.
• Digital Ocean deployment example.
• Tests.
• Logging.
• Language selection.
• Automatic API views.
• API key generator.

If you have any suggestions or want to help, feel free to drop me a line at maxhalford25@gmail.com or to create an issue.

Libraries

Backend

• Flask, obviously.
• Flask-Login for the user accounts.
• Flask-SQLAlchemy interacting with the database.
• Flask-WTF and WTForms for the form handling.
• Flask-Mail for sending mails.
• itsdangerous for generating random tokens for the confirmation emails.
• Flask-Bcrypt for generating secret user passwords.
• Flask-Admin for building an administration interface.
• Flask-Script for managing the app.
• structlog for logging.
• Flask-DebugToolBar for adding a performance toolbar in development.
• gunicorn for acting as a reverse-proxy for Nginx.

Frontend

• Semantic UI for the global style. Very similar to Bootstrap.
• Leaflet JS for the map. I only added it for the sake of the example.

Structure

I did what most people recommend for the application's structure. Basically, everything is contained in the app/ folder.

• There you have the classic static/ and templates/ folders. The templates/ folder contains macros, error views and a common layout.
• I added a views/ folder to separate the user and the website logic, which could be extended to the the admin views.
• The same goes for the forms/ folder, as the project grows it will be useful to split the WTForms code into separate files.
• The models.py script contains the SQLAlchemy code, for the while it only contains the logic for a users table.
• The toolbox/ folder is a personal choice, in it I keep all the other code the application will need.
• Management commands should be included in manage.py. Enter python manage.py -? to get a list of existing commands.
• I added a Makefile for setup tasks, it can be quite useful once a project grows.

Setup

Vanilla

• Install the requirements and setup the development environment.

  make install && make dev

• Create the database.

  python manage.py initdb

• Run the application.

  python manage.py runserver

• Navigate to localhost:5000.

Virtual environment

pip install virtualenv virtualenv venv venv/bin/activate (venv\scripts\activate on Windows) make install make dev python manage.py initdb python manage.py runserver

Deployment

The current application can be deployed with Docker in a few commands.

cd ~/path/to/application/
docker-machine create -d virtualbox --virtualbox-memory 512 --virtualbox-cpu-count 1 dev
docker-machine env dev
eval "$(docker-machine env dev)"
docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d
docker-compose run web make dev
docker-compose run web python3 manage.py initdb

Then access the IP address given by docker-machine ip dev et voilà. This is exactly how OpenBikes's API is being deployed.

Configuration

The goal is to keep most of the application's configuration in a single file called config.py. I added a config_dev.py and a config_prod.py who inherit from config_common.py. The trick is to symlink either of these to config.py. This is done in by running make dev or make prod.

I have included a working Gmail account to confirm user email addresses and reset user passwords, although in production you should't include the file if you push to GitHub because people can see it. The same goes for API keys, you should keep them secret. You can read more about secret configuration files here.

Read this for information on the possible configuration options.

Examples

• Screenshots

Inspiration

• The Flask Mega-Tutorial.
• Explore Flask.

Other possibilities

• flask-boilerplate by Michael Herman.
• Flask-Foundation by Jack Stouffer.
• fbone by Wilson Xu.

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see the license file for more information.