Object Oriented Python with Flask Server?

I know this is a late reply, but I came across this question while facing a similar issue. I found flask-classful really good. You inherit your class from FlaskView and register the Flask app with your MyServer class

http://flask-classful.teracy.org/#

In this case, with flask-classful, your code would look like this:

from flask import Flask
from flask_classful import FlaskView, route

app = Flask(__name__)

class MyServer(FlaskView):
  def __init__(self):
    globalData = json.load(filename)

  @route('/getSomeData')
  def getSomeData():
    return random.choice(globalData) #select some random data to return


MyServer.register(app, base_route="/")


if __name__ == "__main__":
  app.run(host='0.0.0.0')

You can create an instance of MyServer just outside the scope of your endpoints and access its attributes. This worked for me:

class MyServer:
    def __init__(self):
        self.globalData = "hello"

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

my_server = MyServer()

@app.route("/getSomeData")
def getSomeData():
    return my_server.globalData

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(host="0.0.0.0")

The least-coupled solution is to apply the routes at runtime (instead of at load time):

def init_app(flask_app, database_interface, filesystem_interface):
    server = MyServer(database_interface, filesystem_interface)
    flask_app.route('get_data', methods=['GET'])(server.get_data)

This is very testable--just invoke init_app() in your test code with the mocked/faked dependencies (database_interface and filesystem_interface) and a flask app that has been configured for testing (app.config["TESTING"]=True or something like that) and you're all-set to write tests that cover your entire application (including the flask routing).

The only downside is this isn't very "Flasky" (or so I've been told); the Flask idiom is to use @app.route(), which is applied at load time and is necessarily tightly coupled because dependencies are hard-coded into the implementation instead of injected into some constructor or factory method (and thus complicated to test).

Tags:

Python

Flask