The SILShack class blog - Fall 2013

This will serve as a guide to installing Flask on your local machine to serve up dynamic webpages.

Install Flask: pip install Flask

Install Flaskr (a Flask blog example on GitHub): git clone https://github.com/silshack/flaskr.git cd flaskr python flaskr.py

The program is now looking in your Flaskr directory for files to serve up to your web browser at http://127.0.0.1:5000/

The log in is admin and password is default. This can be changed in the file flaskr.py

Instead of static pages, Flask uses what they call "routes" to return a page when the user asks for it. We will now create an about page as an example.

Go into templates and create a file called about.html

The file will be a mix of HTML and Jinja (similar to Liquid) as template for a page.

{% extends "layout.html" %}
{% block body %}
  <h2>About</h2>
  <p> This is being written between two &ltp&gt tags.</p>
{% endblock %}

Notice the special characters for '<' and '>' since this is actually HTML between the <p> tags.

Now we will add the route to the flaskr.py file in the flaskr directory. Copy and paste the below code to go right beneath the last route, which should be logout.

@app.route('/about')
def about():
    return render_template('about.html')

Now we add a link in the layout.html file found in templates. This goes right after <div class=metanav> and before {% if not session.logged_in %}.

<a href="">about</a>

If everything worked out you should have a new about link that should point to a page that looks like this.