Welcome to part one of the the Flask 101 Series. 

 

1. Flask 101: Create a Basic Python Web App – This tutorial
2. Flask 101: Add JSON to your Python Web App
3. Flask 101: Use HTML templates & send variables 
4. Flask 101: Serve Images 
5. Flask 101: Serve CSV Files

 

This is probably one of the simplest applications you can generate with Flask: we will create an app that adds two numbers and returns the answer. As usual, I will assume that you run Linux.

 

1 – Setup

If you want to use a Python 3 virtual environment, you can follow this post for example. But all you really need is to install Flask

# Install flask
pip install flask

 

2 – Create your basic flask application

We are going to create two routes to test our API

• /
  Which is going to tell users how to use the api
• add
  takes two numbers x and y and returns the value x+y

Create a file named myapp.py with the following contents.

from flask import Flask, request

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def myapp():
    message = "To use this app: %s/add?x=value&y=value" % request.base_url
    return message

@app.route('/add')
def add():
    # Checking that both parameters have been supplied
    if not 'x' in request.args:
        return "x value is missing"
    if not 'y' in request.args:
        return "y value is missing"
    
    # Make sure they are numbers too
    try:
        x = float(request.args['x'])
        y = float(request.args['y'])
    except:
        return "x and y should be numbers"
    return str(x+y)

 

3 – Run your app

In the same directory as myapp.py, create a file named runapp.sh with the following contents.

export FLASK_APP=myapp
export FLASK_ENV=development
flask run

Close the file, then in the command line, run it with

# Execute this in the command line inside the same directory 
bash runapp.sh

You should see the following output

* Serving Flask app "myapp" (lazy loading)
* Environment: development
* Debug mode: on
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
* Restarting with stat
* Debugger is active!
* Debugger PIN: 319-407-766

 

4 – Test your app