Python Flask Blog

TECH STACK:

• Python
• Flask
• Jinja
• Javascript
• HTML
• CSS
• Heroku
• Markdown

Created Programming Blog using Flask framework. This is a static site using markdown for occasional writing. Posts are composed in Markdown which includes ability for code snuppets.

Requirements:

Python dependencies:

• Flask==0.10.1
• Flask-FlatPages==0.5
• Frozen-Flask==0.11
• Jinja2==2.7.1
• Markdown==2.3.1
• MarkupSafe==0.18
• PyYAML==3.10
• Pygments==1.6
• Werkzeug==0.9.3
• itsdangerous==0.22
• wsgiref==0.1.2

After creating virutal env drop list above in to command line and

execute pip install -r requirements.txt from your shell.

FOLDER STRUCTURE

create folders to store static markdown pages. Should have 4 directories, 2 files ├── blog.py ├── content │ └── posts │ └── firstpost.md ├── static └── templates

THE ROUTES FILE

import sys

from flask import Flask, render_template

from flask_flatpages import FlatPages, pygments_style_defs

from flask_frozen import Freezer

DEBUG = True

FLATPAGES_AUTO_RELOAD = DEBUG

FLATPAGES_EXTENSION = '.md'

FLATPAGES_ROOT = 'content'

POST_DIR = 'posts'

app = Flask(__name__) flatpages = FlatPages(app) freezer = Freezer(app) app.config.from_object(__name__)

if __name__ == "__main__": if len(sys.argv) > 1 and sys.argv[1] == "build": freezer.freeze() else: app.run(host='0.0.0.0', debug=True)

Before this line --> if __name__ == "__main__" add the following:

@app.route("/posts/") def posts(): #iterate over the list and sort posts by date posts = [p for p in flatpages if p.path.startswith(POST_DIR)] posts.sort(key=lambda item:item['date'], reverse=False) return render_template('posts.html', posts=posts)

@app.route('/posts//') def post(name): path = '{}/{}'.format(POST_DIR, name) post = flatpages.get_or_404(path) return render_template('post.html', post=post)

TEMPLATES

Create template for posts.html for list of posts --> here is minimal skelton of post templates

{% for post in posts %} {{ post.title }} {{ post.date }} {% endfor %}

create template for post.html And for post.html, drop the following into your template wherever you want them displayed! {{ post.html|safe }} {{ post.title }} {{ post.date }}

NEXT: creating Markdown for posts

POSTS store your markdown files in the content/posts/ directory as some_file_name.md, and include a small amount of metadata in each file. title: Should it be YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM date: 2013-08-27

DEPLOY / SHIP IT

If you want to run this server to test on your local machine, you can simply run the script using python blog.py. or you can deply to heroku or github pages