Just an implementation of Miguel Grinberg's Flask based microblog. It's probably useful to link out to the Flask, Jinja2 and SQLAlchemy ORM docs here though the concepts covered in the tutorial are pretty self-contained.

You can use this code but you're better off just going through the exercises yourself.

I may have made changes, use at your own risk.

This is probably out of date and there might be better ways to learn Flask, but this exercise has been pretty solid and no overt errors in the code so far. I do sometimes have issues understanding where new code should be placed and I find it useful to go check out the example repo on GitHub. All chapters are tagged on the example repo for easy reference.

I've made some changes to formatting and have converted to use f-strings where it makes code more readable.

I have made this code MIT same as Grinberg's original

All of this stuff is well documented already in the Flask based microblog series however I'm putting possibly useful information here so I don't have to dig through docs to look this up later if I need it.

flask run in the correct venv will get you there.

In Ch. 4 there are important steps documented that need to be taken when you make a change to the db schema.

The first one is flask db migrate which examines the db as described in the models.py and autogenerates a script to migrate from the current schema to the new schema.

flask db migrate -m "short description of changes"

The second command is flask db upgrade which runs the migration.

Note: Remember to check in the migration script under the ./migration/ directory.

Putting this here because I forget a lot.

# In Python 3.4 or newer run:
python3 -m venv venv
# In older python install virtualenv and run
virtualenv venv

Entering the virtual environment:

source venv/bin/activate

Exit the virtual environment

deactivate

There's a built in python REPL that's accessible using the flask shell command and loads the entire operating environment for testing purposes. This gets set up in the microblog.py parent command using the app.shell_context_processor decorator and controls db models loaded. If you want to automatically load more models you'll need to configure it.

from app import app, db
from app.models import User, Post

@app.shell_context_processor
def make_shell_context():
    return {'db': db, 'User': User, 'Post': Post}

See end of Ch. 4 for more useful info.

This is in Ch. 7 along with error pages.

Use these environment variables to send errors through gmail:

export MAIL_SERVER=smtp.googlemail.com
export MAIL_PORT=587
export MAIL_USE_TLS=1
export MAIL_USERNAME=<your-gmail-username>
export MAIL_PASSWORD=<your-gmail-password>

To test email you can run a test mail server using python:

python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:8025

You can then configure the webapp to use this server by setting the following variables:

export MAIL_SERVER=localhost
export MAIL_PORT=8025

In Ch. 8 there are some unit tests using the unittest framework and can be run with python tests.py

Currently on Ch. 14

This chapter was a slog as there was a lot to edit, these edits weren't documented well and for me there was little payoff. Nota bene: if you are reading this and you found this part of the tutorial hard to follow, you're not alone. My recommendation if you don't want to just DL his code and jam it in your repo is to look at the output of pybabel extract -F babel.cfg -k _l -o messages.pot . and go through the files it checks in order and do the edits. As a rule you are wrapping messages in .py files with _l(' ') and messages in jinja files with {{ _(' ')}}. The odd ones are listed in the chapter but it's not always clear.
I didn't test this other than to make sure it ran. It's good to know how this mechanism works but it really slowed me down.
I kinda wish this was done after the reorg in ch 15 because you touch so many parts of the code.

1. Save the pip requirements pip freeze > requirements.txt if the requirements change
2. Update the current chapter in the readme
3. If a db migration has occurred, make sure to check in the migration script