Building-Web-APIs-with-Flask

This repo contains the app built following the Building Web APIs with Flask course by Gergo Bogdan on Lynda.com.

Setup

Create a folder for the project (or clone the repo). Create a venv folder and initialize Virtualenv in this folder:

mkdir venv
virtualenv venv/

All the necessary tools will be installed:

Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done.

Let's activate the virtual environment, now:

source venv/bin/activate

Now we can install Flask using pip:

pip install flask

Application: The first two files

Let's now create two files: app.py and quotes.py.

In app.py we first import Flask and other modules:

from flask import Flask, jsonify
import random

We also import the quotes that are stored in quotes.py:

from quotes import funny_quotes

quotes is the name of the file, and funny_quotes is the only function in this file. The quotes are stored in a dictionary where the key is the author, and the value is the quote.

We then declare a Flask app and pass the name of the current file as parameter:

app = Flask(__name__)

The app itself is simple: We import the quotes, calculate the number of quotes based on the length of the dictionary, and use that length to generate a random quote index in the dictionary and pull the corresponding quote. The output of that dictionary is then returned jsonified.

At the end of the script we only start the Flask application if the Python script is started separately. The app is started in debug mode:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True)

Flask template usage

Project folder structure

Two important folders: static and templates. static will contain css, JavaScript, images, etc. templates is the folder Flask will look for for the Jinja2 templates.

Not a great course