Building Data-Driven Web Apps with Flask and SQLAlchemy Transcripts
Chapter: Your first Flask site
Lecture: Demo: CLI starter site
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Now we're going to both use PyCharm
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as well as just the command line interface
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to create our first little demo site.
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Let's get started by choosing the command line interface.
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With this way you're going to see all the little steps
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every single thing that you got to do.
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With PyCharm, you might check a few boxes
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and push some buttons, and things that you'll see here
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will happen behind the scenes.
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So, this might take a few more steps
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but it's also going to show you exactly what's going on.
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So, here we are on my computer.
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And we're over in the GitHub repository for this course.
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What we're going to do, is we're going to go into
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ch04_first_site. The first three chapters had no code.
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It's time to rectify that for
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the rest of the course by the way.
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So, we're going to start at chapter four.
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And we have first_site final, and starter.
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Remember, when I talked about following along
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I'm going to show you, or provide you the code
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that we start with and end with for each chapter.
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Well right now, the starting code is basically non-existent
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but in the future, maybe we've
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already set up the database in SQLAlchemy
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and now we want to add some kind of form input or something.
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We don't want to rebuild the site from scratch
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so we're going to kind of have these save points along the way
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and we're going to work over here in final.
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Now the first thing that we want to do
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let's go into there, just copy that. See it's empty.
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So what we need to do, is we're going to go
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and create a virtual environment, that was our first step.
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Or what I could do is I could type python3 -m venv venv
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That will create it. And then I could activate it.
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And of course, pip and setup tools are always out of date
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so we could then go and upgrade those.
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But what you'll see me do throughout this class
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is I have a little alias
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that I've defined, that does those three steps.
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All right, so I'm just going to run that here.
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And we can see the prompt changed
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and if we ask which python it is now, this one right here.
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By the way, sometimes people ask me how I get this shell
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and this little git status tracking and so on.
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This is Oh My Zsh or Oh My Zshell.
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Check that out, that's very cool.
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I definitely do recommend it, but it's not required.
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Okay, so now we have this, the next thing to do
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is to go and make our folder structure.
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So we've got our app right here.
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Let's suppose that this directory that we're working in
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actually, we'll just make a directory called first_site
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or something like that.
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I want to go into first_site, and in here
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we're going to have things like templates
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and a static folder and those are kind of standard.
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We're also going to have something called views
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and this is where we're going to put all the view methods.
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And we're also going to have something called viewmodels.
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So, this is a design pattern that I really like
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that I have adapted to the web.
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And I think it is super, super powerful.
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We have a whole chapter on it later.
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Let's just make the structure for it now.
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And make another one for data, so where our data models go.
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And then finally, let's not throw everything
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just into the root of that static folder.
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You're going to have a lot of static files
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so let's make a static js, a css and an img.
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You can make them short, long names, javascript, or js
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whatever, it doesn't really matter.
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So now if we look here, we have all the stuff
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and we upload of it, we have our virtual environment.
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If we look down here, you can ask for a tree
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and we can ignore the rich environment
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we don't want to see that.
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Here's what it looks like.
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We have our first_site, we have data
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we have our structured static file here.
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We've templates, view models, and views.
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The other thing that we need to do
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is we need to have our app.py
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and probably a good idea to have our requirements.txt
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I also like to have the -dev.
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The reason is, I want to put stuff for
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like, testing, continuous integration
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other helpful tools for me in here
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that don't get installed on the server, but, you know
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I always install this one when I'm working on it
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and then this is like the production line
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and the bottom one imports the top one.
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Okay, so now everything's up and ready to go.
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We're going to need to edit our app.py.
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And just so we don't talk to PyCharm yet
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let's just open us up Visual Studio Code.
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And we just have to do a few things.
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We're going to have flask, we're going to
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define an app from flask, we'll say flask.Flask.
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I'm going to pass that dunder name in there
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and then we're going to have a method.
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That's going to be our view method.
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So I have an app.route.
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So we'll just have a quick index method here
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takes no parameters and it's going to return hello world.
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And the simplest thing to do is say app.run.
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There's better things to do in practice
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but that's what we got.
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Okay, so we should be able to run this
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assuming that we've edited or
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somehow installed our requirements.
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We'll work on that in a moment.
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Let's just pip install flask.
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Now here we are with our app.
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We can just say python app.py.
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Looks like we have our flask app running.
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Notice it's running in production.
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We'll talk about how to alter that
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as we get into a real app.
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But for now let's just see what we got going on here.
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Well look at that, hello world.
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Make it more impressive, I'll zoom it.
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There you go, hello world. That's our app.
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So we've got our basic structure here.
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Our tree that we can look at
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so we've got our first_site and all that code here.
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The reason I put this in a sub-directory
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is we ultimately may want to install this as a package.
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It makes some of the testing
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and other things slightly easier when we do that.
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Slightly easier for her to parts without worring
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about partial relative paths and things like that.
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So, that allows us to put the setup.py and other stuff
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outside of the site itself, that's typically how that goes.
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So, here's our code.
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We've got our static section
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our templates, our view models, our views.
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Haven't done too much of that yet
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but this is the general structure
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we're going to use to get started.
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We'll put flask in here, maybe pytest in there
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and whatnot as we go.
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But this is our first_site, and this is
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how you do it on the command line.
