Py This! Experimenting with Flask - Part 1

A while back I started a project called Caster. The main goal of this project was to build out a simple blogging system with the Python framework called Flask. However, I found myself distracted with other projects and Caster faded into the background. Today I decided I revist that idea, but with a few more stipulations than last time.

This is part of what will probably end up being a 3 part series.

In terms of features I knew I wanted markdown support for creating posts, I also knew I would want tags and categories for each post. I'm not currently planning to allow multiple users for this, as it will be more of a static site than a WordPress clone.

The Setup

The system I'm using to develop this on is running Arch Linux which is great, but also doesn't come with pip installed. To get that going, I just needed pacman.

$ sudo pacman -S python-pip

Now to install virtualenv..

$ sudo pip install virtualenv

I already have a GitHub repository setup for Caster, so a simple $ git clone got my directory setup. Now I just need a virtualenv, and to activate it.

$ virtualenv venv
$ . venv/bin/activate

Awesome, time to get flask going next..

$ pip install Flask

As a small note, I'm using PyCharm - Community as an editor, so I had to add the virtual env to its settings, but that was pretty straight forward.

Getting on with it

Now that setup is done, I can finally start working with Flask. I haven't decided if I want a database yet, so I haven't chosen to do that setup yet. From in PyCharm, in the root of the project folder, I make a new file called server.py. Right now I'm just wanting to warm back up to Flask, so I'm going with their getting started code, with the edition of app.debug = True.

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def hello_world():
    return 'Hello World!'

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

To be continued...