Building a simple web application using Flask

What is Flask?

Flask is a very popular “micro” web development framework built with Python. The framework is most popular especially for small to medium size applications. For me, this framework has been THE framework of choice for most of my python projects.

Flask is the framework for beginners, especially if you do not have solid understanding of how the web works. I personally started with Django, but got stuck as it does many things behind the scenes and one must use ORM almost compulsorily to use django. Flask on the other hand is quite simplistic and the purpose of this article is to show you how to use it to build a simple CRUD app with sqlite database.

What are we building?

We are build a simple application to add and display car information. The whole code is available in github link

Spinning up a basic app

Here is the code to build a simple hello world flask app

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########################
# Simple hello world app
########################
from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route("/")
def index():
    return "hello world"
app.run(debug=True)

The line app = Flask(__name__) creates a Flask class instance which is used throughout the code. Url routing is defined through the @app decorative in line 3. The line says that whenever a http GET request is made to the / url call the function index. The last line starts the app in debug mode so that the app auto restarts whenver we make changes and save.

Now, if you open a browser and type localhost:5000 and hit enter key you will see a “hello world” on the screen.

Creating tables

We create another file database.py to house the entire database related code. Here is the code to create the tables company and car. Each car belongs to a company, thus, there is a foreign key relationship

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import sqlite3
import datetime

def getConnection():
    conn = sqlite3.connect("car.db")
    conn.row_factory = sqlite3.Row
    return conn

def create():
    conn = getConnection()

    try:
        query = """
    create table company(id integer primary key autoincrement, 
    name varchar(30) not null, 
    address text, 
    phone varchar(10))
    """
        
        conn.execute(query)
        conn.commit()

        query = """
    create table car(id integer primary key autoincrement, 
    name varchar(30) not null, 
    model varchar(30) not null, 
    color varchar(10) default "red", 
    launch_date date default CURRENT_DATE,
    company integer not null,
    foreign key (company) references company(id))
    """
        conn.execute(query)
        conn.commit()
    except Exception as e:
        print(e)
    finally:
        conn.close()

We take a connection and execute the sql query for creating tables. The database used here is sqlite3 which comes preinstalled with python 3+.

The code for other functions is self explainatory. The main task everytime is

Take database connection
Execute query
Return result / status

Rendering html

Flask requires a folder called templates. You can create html files and store in this folder. Jinja template engine is used by flask to generate dynamic pages on the server side. Here is an example.

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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Main Page</title>
</head>
<body>
    {% for i in range(10) %}
    <h1>Hello {{name}}</h1>
    {% endfor %}
</body>
</html>

We need to set up a url to render this page. We need to use render_template function to render the page

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@app.route("/search")
def index():
    name = request.args.get("name", "world")
    # return f"<h1>Hello {name}!!</h1>"
    return render_template("index.html", name=name)

Now, if you open the url localhost:5000/search?name=ram you will get Hello ram 10 times. You can download and playaround with the code. To add static files (css,js etc) just add another folder called static and use in the html files.

Building a simple web application using Flask

What is Flask?

What are we building?

Spinning up a basic app

Creating tables

Rendering html

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