Set Up a Maintainable Flask Application in a Virtual Environment

Setting up a new Flask Application

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Here are the steps to set up the foundation for a maintainable Flask application.

1. Create a folder for our new application called yumroad-app
2. With your terminal, create a virtual environment in the yumroad-app folder by running python3 -m venv env
3. Activate the Virtual Environment by running source env/bin/activate in your terminal (You should see your prompt prefixed with a (env) to know that your virtual env is activated)

1. Create a requirements.txt that lists the following starting libraries as requirements

flask
gunicorn

pytest
pytest-flask
pytest-cov

5. Install those libraries by running pip install -r requirements.txt
6. Create a folder called yumroad and then a file called __init__.py within the yumroad folder
7. Setup the basic application factory pattern in the __init__.py file

from flask import Flask

def create_app(environment_name='dev'):
    app = Flask(__name__)
    return app