Develop Reference

How To Create Template Based Dynamic URL with Flask

I have a flask route this like:
#app.route('/product/<string:slug>')
def product(slug):
# some codes...
return render_template('product.html', product=product)
Different clients use the project (different websites, same infrastructure). And every customer wants the product URL to be different. Like;
asite.com/product-nike-shoe-323
bsite.com/nike-shoe
csite.com/product/nike-shoue
vs. vs
How do I set the URL structure to come from the database?
like:
url_config = "product-{product_name}-{product_id}"
or
url_config = "product-{product_id}"
Note: please without redirect.

I’m not 100% clear on what you refer to when you say “database” here. From context I infer you may be talking about the Flask Config object. If that’s the case, you can simply register your view function right after setting up the app configuration. Just call app.add_url_rule() to register the URL pattern from the configuration to point to your view function of choice.
If, however, you are talking about a SQL or NoSQL database and you have built a web UI to register routes, then don’t dispair. Flask routes can be registered with the app object at any point. There is no point in the Flask app lifecycle after which you can no longer register a route!
All that registering a route does, is create a mapping between a URL template and endpoint name, an opaque string. Most of the time, you also register a function to be called to handle the specific endpoint, and most of the time, Flask infers the endpoint name from the function. Once registered in the mapping any next incoming request can be routed to the function for the given endpoint.
So, Flask keeps two maps:
from url route -> endpoint name: Flask.url_map
from endpoint name -> function: Flask.view_functions
That said, there is API for removing or changing url registrations (other than restarting your server, of course). You can’t change the url route, the endpoint name for a given route or what endpoint maps to what function. The intention of the framework is that you register your routes early on when first starting your server, via code that runs directly when imported or when bound to the app (Blueprints and Flask extensions do the latter). The majority of Flask apps will create their Flask instance, register all their routes and extensions, then pass the instance to the WSGI server for request dispatch, and that’s it. But there is nothing in the implementation stopping you from registering more routes after this point.
If you want to register URL routes from database information, you have to take care of at least the following two things:
Register existing routes at start-up. Once you have a connection to your database established, retrieve the existing routes and register them.
If a new entry is added to the database, register a new route.
First of all: if I were to implement something like this I’d use one view function. You can always figure out what url rule was matched and what endpoint name this mapped to by looking at request.url_rule and request.endpoint, respectively.
Next, I’d explicitly generate endpoint names for each url rule from the database. Use the primary key in the name; you want to be able to find the database row from the endpoint name and vice versa. How you do this is up to you; let’s assume you know how to do this, and you have two functions for this named pk_from_endpoint() and endpoint_from_pk().
Your view function can then look like this:
from flask import request
def product_request(**kwargs):
key = pk_from_endpoint(request.endpoint)
row = database_query(key)
# … process request
You register a route for a given database row with:
app.add_url_route(row.url_config, endpoint_from_pk(row.id), product_request)
As mentioned, you can’t change URL registrations. But, as long as changes to these URLs are infrequent you could always add new registrations and for any old entries use abort(404) to return a 404 Not Found response.

That's not possible with Flask's routing system. The URL map is supposed to be defined at startup and not change after that.
However, if you have some specific path where you need the dynamic parts (e.g. /product/WHATEVER), then you can register a route for /product/<slug> and query the database within your view function.
That said, if you REALLY want URL rules in a DB, and do not mind connecting to your database during startup (usually that's ugly), then nothing stop you from querying the database at startup time and define the URL rules based on data from the DB. Quite ugly, but doable.
Example:
with app.app_context():
url_map = {u.endpoint: u.rule for u in URLRules.query}
#app.route(url_map['foo'])
def foo():
...
Of course doing so makes it harder to nicely structure your app unless you use app.add_url_rule() for all the endpoints in a single place instead of the #app.route() decorators.
Likewise with blueprints of course.

Hot reloading properties in a Python Flask/Django app

Gurus, Wizards, Geeks
I am tasked with providing Python Flask apps (more generally, webapps written in python) a way to reload properties on the fly.
Specifically, my team and I currently deploy python apps with a {env}.properties file that contains various environment specific configurations in a key value format (yaml for instance). Ideally, these properties are reloaded by the app when changed. Suppose a secondary application existed that updates the previously mentioned {env}.properties file, the application should ALSO be able to read and use new values.
Currently, we read the {env}.properties at startup and the values are accessed via functions stored in a context.py. I could write a function that could periodically update the variables. Before starting an endeavor like this, I thought I would consult the collective to see if someone else has solved this for Django or Flask projects (as it seems like a reasonable request for feature flags, etc).

One such pattern is the WSGI application factory pattern.
In short, you define a function that instantiates the application object. This pattern works with all WSGI-based frameworks.
The Flask docs explain application factories pretty well.
This allows you to define the application dynamically on-the-fly, without the need to redeploy or deploy many configurations of an application. You can change just about anything about the app this way, including configuration, routes, middlewares, and more.
A simple example of this would be something like:
def get_settings(env):
"""get the (current, updated) application settings"""
...
return settings
def create_app(env: str):
if env not in ('dev', 'staging', 'production'):
raise ValueError(f'{env} is not a valid environment')
app = Flask(__name__)
app.config.update(get_settings(env))
return app
Then, you could set FLASK_APP environment variable to something like "myapp:create_app('dev')" and that would do it. This is also the same way you could specify this for servers like gunicorn.
The get_settings function should be written to return the newest settings. It could even do something like retrieve settings from an external source like S3, a config service, or anything.

Modular routes in python flask

I am trying to have one service which will fulfill two related functions. I would like to have something like this for my REST api:
/route1/get/as_text
/route2/get/as_json
In nodejs, you can pass off a collection of routes from some base URL by saying:
app.use('/route1/', route1.js)
app.use('/route2/', route2.js)
and then the route1.js will have routes defined like this:
app.router('/as_text', function(){//some stuff})
When I do this, can define a set of routes, that all have /route1/ as the basis of the URL. I would like to do something similar in flask, where I just define the first section of the url, and add all logic of that section of the API into a file which is separate to another section of the api.
Is this possible in flask? Or should I look for a new approach?

You'll want to take a look at Blueprints.
When defining your application, you can register Blueprints with a path prefix:
app = Flask(__name__, template_folder='views')
app.register_blueprint(controllers.route1, url_prefix="/route1")
app.register_blueprint(controllers.route2, url_prefix="/route2")
Then define the controllers for these routes in separate files.
route1 = Blueprint('route1', __name__, template_folder='views')
#route1.route('/get/as_text',methods=['GET'])
def get_as_text_route():
return json.jsonify(data="my data")
You could also checkout Flask Restful for creating REST APIs in with Flask.

Is there a better way to access my public api?

I am new to Flask.
I have a public api, call it api.example.com.
#app.route('/api')
def api():
name = request.args.get('name')
...
return jsonify({'address':'100 Main'})
I am building an app on top of my public api (call it www.coolapp.com), so in another app I have:
#app.route('/make_request')
def index():
params = {'name':'Fred'}
r = requests.get('http://api.example.com', params=params)
return render_template('really_cool.jinja2',address=r.text)
Both api.example.com and www.coolapp.com are hosted on the same server. It seems inefficient the way I have it (hitting the http server when I could access the api directly). Is there a more efficient way for coolapp to access the api and still be able to pass in the params that api needs?

Ultimately, with an API powered system, it's best to hit the API because:
It's user testing the API (even though you're the user, it's what others still access);
You can then scale easily - put a pool of API boxes behind a load balancer if you get big.
However, if you're developing on the same box you could make a virtual server that listens on localhost on a random port (1982) and then forwards all traffic to your api code.
To make this easier I'd abstract the API_URL into a setting in your settings.py (or whatever you are loading in to Flask) and use:
r = requests.get(app.config['API_URL'], params=params)
This will allow you to make a single change if you find using this localhost method isn't for you or you have to move off one box.
Edit
Looking at your comments you are hoping to hit the Python function directly. I don't recommend doing this (for the reasons above - using the API itself is better). I can also see an issue if you did want to do this.
First of all we have to make sure the api package is in your PYTHONPATH. Easy to do, especially if you're using virtualenvs.
We from api import views and replace our code to have r = views.api() so that it calls our api() function.
Our api() function will fail for a couple of reasons:
It uses the flask.request to extract the GET arg 'name'. Because we haven't made a request with the flask WSGI we will not have a request to use.
Even if we did manage to pass the request from the front end through to the API the second problem we have is using the jsonify({'address':'100 Main'}). This returns a Response object with an application type set for JSON (not just the JSON itself).
You would have to completely rewrite your function to take into account the Response object and handle it correctly. A real pain if you do decide to go back to an API system again...

Depending on how you structure your code, your database access, and your functions, you can simply turn the other app into package, import the relevant modules and call the functions directly.
You can find more information on modules and packages here.
Please note that, as Ewan mentioned, there's some advantages to using the API. I would advise you to use requests until you actually need faster requests (this is probably premature optimization).
Another idea that might be worth considering, depending on your particular code, is creating a library that is used by both applications.

WebApp needs to do something first time only, where to put that logic? Flask or django

The web app I am working on needs to perform a first-time setup or initialization,
where is a good place to put that logic? I dont want to perform the check if a configuration/setup exists on each request to / or before any request as thats kind of not performant.
I was thinking of performing a check if there is a sane configuration when the app starts up, then change the default route of / to a settings/setup page, and change it back. But thats like self-changing code a bit.
This is required since the web app needs settings and then to index stuff based on those settings which take a bit of time. So after the settings have been made, I still need to wait a while until the indexing is done. So even after the settings/setup has been made, any requests following, will need to see a "wait indexing" message.
Im using flask, but this is relevant for django as well I think.
EDIT: Im thinking like this now;
When starting up, check the appconfig.py for MY_SETTINGS, if it is not there
add a default from config.py and put a status=firstrun object on the app.config, also
change the / route to setup view function.
The setup view function will then check for the app.config.status object and perform
The setup of settings as necessary after user input, when the settings are okay,
remove app.config.status or change it to "indexing", then I can have a before_request function to check for the app.config.status just to flash a message of it.
Or I could use the flask.g instead of app.config to store the status?

The proper way is creating a CLI script, preferably via Flask-Script if you use Flask (in Django it would be the default manage.py where you can easily add custom commands, too) and defining a function such as init or install:
from flaskext.script import Manager
from ... import app
manager = Manager(app)
#manager.command
def init():
"""Initialize the application"""
# your code here
Then you mention it in your documentation and can easily assume that it has been run when the web application itself is accessed.