Request counter

Story

This assignment is a list of exercises for practicing Flask. You can find multiple features which you can use separately after the Preparation part. Do not forget to commit after you completed a part.

What are you going to learn?

• Send HTTP requests with GET, POST, PUT and DELETE method.
• Use global variables with Flask and display their value on a page.
• Write different behaviors for different HTTP methods on the same endpoint.

Tasks

1. Initialize an empty Flask project with a new virtualenv and a .gitignore file.

   • A venv folder containing a virtual environment with at least python 3.8 is created.
   • A requirements.txt with Flask as one of the requirements is created.
   • A templates folder is created for your HTML template files.
   • A server.py is created, in which you can handle incoming HTTP requests.
   • A .gitignore file is created to ignore unnecessary venv, pyCharm, Flask, or python files.

2. Create a / route for the main page from which users can reach the features of the Request counter.

   • The page has a GET-Request link that sends a GET request to the /request-counter route
   • The page has a POST-Request button (in a form) that sends a POST request to the /request-counter route
   • The page has a Statistics link that navigates to the /statistics route

3. Create a /request-counter route that can count incoming HTTP requests.

   • The numbers of requests are stored for each HTTP method (GET, POST, DELETE, PUT) in separate global variables.
   • After increasing the count this route redirects to main page.

4. Create a /statistics route which can show the count results.

   • The page has a link which leads back to to home page.
   • The page has a table which contains 4 rows (one for each HTTP method) and two columns (one for the method name and one for the request count).

5. Store the request count data in a text file instead of global variable.

   • A text file named request_counts.txt is created.
   • The request_counts.txt's content is the following. GET: 5 POST: 3 DELETE: 1 PUT: 0

General requirements

None

Hints

• You can send PUT and DELETE requests with Curl. This way you can try your request counter with all HTTP methods to make sure it works.

Background materials

• Pip and VirtualEnv
• A web-framework for Python: Flask
• Flask documentation (the Quickstart gives a good overview)
• Install Curl
• Example to test DELETE/PUT request
• Ports