My Flask REST API Boilerplate and Set Up

An opinionated boilerplate and set up for a Flask REST API project. I have personally used this set up to bootstrap Flask projects extremely quickly. Please feel free to use it!

---

My boilerplate & set up may be useful to you IF:

• Your Flask projects normally have an enormous, monolithic app.py file.
• You're looking for opinions on project organization and modularity.
• You're looking to bootstrap a REST API project for a personal project or coding challenge.
• You're looking to play around with a ready-to-go Flask application.
• You want to try out Pytest, an extremely simple and expressive testing library.
• You want to try your hand in at configurations-based programming.
• You want to see an example of a factory pattern.
• You want to learn how to set up a basic testing fixture.

---

Project Features

Separation of concerns:

• Separate directories for routes, tests, models, and helpers.
• Application factory pattern - For ease of feeding different sets of configurations (.cfg files) and setting up testing fixtures. Check it all out in /project/init.py
• Using Flask blueprints to separate groups of routes.
• Utilzing helper classes to abstract heavy logic from the routes (with a provided example).

Initial testing configurations:

• Testing with Pytest - For clear, expressive testing.
• Sample testing fixture - For testing a separate instance of a Flask application, connected to its own database and set with its own unique conditions.
• Sample tests for the app, routes, and configuration settings.

Works right out of the box

1. Clone the repo
2. Set up virtual environment - python3 -m venv venv
3. Activate virtual environment - source venv/bin/activate (might be different for Windows)
4. Install dependencies - pip install -r requirements.txt
5. Set to development - export FLASK_ENV=development
6. Run the app - flask run

By default, Flask runs on port 5000 on localhost. Try testing the /ping route to see if it's running!

---

Installation Requirements

Necessary:

• Python 3
• pip
• Python virtual environments

Optional:

• Relational Database - This boilerplate is tested with PostgreSQL. Using with this with a database will require additional set up.

---

Set Up Notes

Set up with a database:

This project is designed to work with PostgreSQL, or any Relational Database that is compatible with SQL Alchemy. However, the project has database-related code commented out by default. Additional set up is required:

1. Modify the relevant .cfg file in /instance to link up to your database of choice. Look for DATABASE_URI line.
2. Search for comments throughout the project that say "USE THE FOLLOWING IF SETTING UP PROJECT WITH A DATABASE". You can find these in:

• /project/init.py - import statements, initialize_extensions method, create_app method
• /project/all_extensions.py - import statements, db = SQLAlchemy()
• Open python REPL or ipython and run the command %run seed.py

*I know that these really aren't the most detailed instructions. I'm still trying to determine if my current design is appropriate for boostrapping a project with a database.

Set up without a database:

If you don't need to set up a project with a database:

• You can delete all commented-out code under the caption: "USE THE FOLLOWING IF SETTING UP PROJECT WITH A DATABASE".
• You can delete the models directory.
• You can delete seed.py.

---

For the Future

• Containerization (Docker)
• Pipenv support
• Database set up instructions
• A better README...