Reorganizing to a Medium-sized Flask Application

17 March 2013in opw

My Flask application has been growing in size, and I needed to reorganize my current module into a package. I learnt to do this from Flask’s documentation. The small application that used to have this hierarchy:

/relmandash
    /relmandash.py
    /relmandash_test.py
    /models.py
    /static --> for .css and .js files
    /templates --> for .html files
    /helper_packages

now looks like this:

/relmandash
    /relmandash_test.py
    /runserver.py
    /relmandash
        /__init.py
        /view.py
        /models.py
        /static
        /templates
        /helper_packages

3 easy steps to shift from a module to a package:

1. Create another folder named after the application (relmandash in this case), and move everything that was required by relmandash.py (including relmandash.py) into this folder.

2. Rename relmandash.py into init.py.

3. Create a new file runserver.py and add these two lines:

   from relmandash import app
   app.run(debug=True)

Simple! Notice how the test application is still located outside of the newly created folder. This does not change as relmandash_test.py just makes use of the relmandash package.

Since I was already re-organizing the application, I thought I might as well group my view functions (functions with @app.route above them) into another file called views.py. I already had a models.py file for my database schema declarations and the import works the same way. All I had to do for views.py was add this line to the top:

from relmandash import app

And right at the bottom of init.py:

import relmandash.views

The documentation does provide an explanation for using circular imports, so I will not go into detail here. I suppose I still don’t see the need for blueprints yet, so meanwhile I’ll savour my new and tidy package!