RESTful Flask Application Quick Start

This repo provides a quick-start template for creating a RESTful web application using the Flask microframework for Python.

Features:

• Python 3.3.x or later.
• Flask 0.11.x.
• SQLAlchemy database models
• Marshmallow for object marshalling
• JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication
• Pytest unit-tests

This is a "pure RESTful" application, it exposes only RESTful APIs and does not generate any HTML, perfect for pairing with a single-page-application (SPA) web front-end or mobile app.

See RESTful Flask application quick-start for more info.

Getting Started

You will need Python 3.x. Use the appropriate installation method for your system to install the latest Python (e.g. 3.5.2) and make sure it is in your path.

Checkout

Clone or download the repo into a working directory. cd into this directory.

Create a Python Virtual Environment

Now create a Python virtual environment for this project with:

python -m venv .virtualenv

Activate the Virtual Environment

Now activate the virtual environment. on macOS, Linux and Unix systems, use:

source .virtualenv/bin/activate

On Windows:

.virtualenv\Scripts\activate.bat

Install the Development Environment

Now run:

pip install -e .[dev]

This will install the packages the project depends on along with some additional packages for development.

Run the Unit Tests

To make sure everything is installed and working correctly, run:

python setup.py test

This will produce a lot of output, but toward the end, you should see something like:

======================================================= test session starts ========================================================
platform darwin -- Python 3.5.2, pytest-3.0.3, py-1.4.31, pluggy-0.4.0
rootdir: /Users/kmilligan/workspace/flask-quickstart, inifile: 
collected 11 items 

tests/test_auth.py ......
tests/test_contacts.py .....

==================================================== 11 passed in 2.90 seconds =====================================================

Run the Server

To start the web server, run

(macOS/Linux/Unix)

export FLASK_APP=sample
flask run

(Windows)

set FLASK_APP=sample
flask run

The API will available at http://localhost:5000.

Note that because this app does not generate HTML itself, requesting this URL with a web browser directly will just return a JSON error message. Use a RESTful client application to authenticate and make requests.