Overview

You can do all sorts of things with Python, including run a website! There are several third-party modules that support this, but we’ll be exploring one that keeps things a little simpler today: Flask. We’re going to focus just on making plain text websites today, but if you are interested in HTML, Flask supports generating fully polished webpages as well.

Basic Learning Objectives

Before class, you should be able to:

  • Explain the basic idea of Flask
  • Identify the syntax that Flask uses for routes

Advanced Learning Objectives

After class, you should be able to:

  • Use Flask to create a basic website

Readings

To achieve the basic learning objectives, you should read the following sections:

  1. What is Flask
  2. Flask Tutorial - Hello World - note that this references having things installed, don’t worry about actually running anything, just read through what each line of the basic app does.
  3. Flask Tutorial - Routes (ignore the ‘flask route post’ section, we won’t get into that in this class)

Checks

(Note that you can’t run Flask on your own machine without doing some additional installing, so I recommend just using the lab machines. If you really want to try installing everything, you can look at this guide from CS 257.)

Submit answers to the following through Moodle:

  1. How does Flask connect Python functions to URLs?
  2. What is one URL that would trigger the following function to run? 
     @app.route('/name/<row>/<column>/')
 def get_cell(row, column):
     return data[int(row)][int(column)]