Typical AngularJS workflow and project structure (with Python Flask)

You can start on either end.

You are right that you probably don't need a full server-side framework with AngularJS. It's typically better to serve static HTML/CSS/JavaScript files, and provide a RESTful API for the back end for the client to consume. One thing that you should probably avoid is mixing server-side templates with AngularJS client-side templates.

If you want to use Flask to serve your files (might be overkill, but you can use it nonetheless) you would copy the contents of "app" from "angular-phonecat" into the "static" folder of "minitwit."

AngularJS is more targeted at AJAX-like applications, whereas flask gives you the ability to do both the older-style web apps as well as create RESTful APIs. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, so it really depends what you want to do. If you give me some insights, I might be able to make further recommendations.

I would start out by organizing the Flask app in the standard structure as follows:

app
|-- app.py
|-- static
    |-- css
    |-- img
    |-- js
|-- templates

And as btford mentioned, if you are doing an Angular app, you'll want to focus on using Angular client-side templates and stay away from server-side templates. Using render_template('index.html') will cause Flask to interpret your angular templates as jinja templates, so they won't render correctly. Instead, you'll want to do the following:

@app.route("/")
def index():
    return send_file('templates/index.html')

Note that using send_file() means that the files will be cached, so you might want to use make_response() instead, at least for development:

    return make_response(open('templates/index.html').read())

Afterwards, build out the AngularJS part of your app, modifying the app structure so that it looks like this:

app
|-- app.py
|-- static
    |-- css
    |-- img
    |-- js
        |-- app.js, controllers.js, etc.
    |-- lib
        |-- angular
            |-- angular.js, etc.
    |-- partials
|-- templates
    |-- index.html

Make sure your index.html includes AngularJS, as well as any other files:

<script src="static/lib/angular/angular.js"></script>

At this point, you haven't yet constructed your RESTful API, so you can have your js controllers return predefined sample data (only a temporary setup). When you're ready, implement the RESTful API and hook it up to your angular app with angular-resource.js.

EDIT: I put together an app template that, though a little more complex that what I've described above, illustrates how one could build an app with AngularJS + Flask, complete with communication between AngularJS and a simple Flask API. Here it is if you want to check it out: https://github.com/rxl/angular-flask

This official Jetbrains PyCharm video by John Lindquist (angular.js and jetbrains guru) is a nice starting point as it shows the interplay of webservice, database and angular.js within flask.

He builds a pinterest clone with flask, sqlalchemy, flask-restless and angular.js in less than 25 minutes.

Enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2geC50roans