How can you update a part of a web page dynamically, without the user having to hit the refresh button on the browser?

This is a question that is frequently asked on the Internet. If you have some knowledge of JavaScript this is relatively easy to do, more so if you use a front end web framework such as React or Vue. But what if you have a standard web application written in Flask and Jinja templates?

In this article I'm going to introduce you to my Turbo-Flask extension, which will allow your Flask application to easily push asynchronous page updates to the browser, without having to write any JavaScript code. In the screenshot below, note how the CPU load numbers update without the user doing anything.

When you learn Flask, you are told to create your Flask application instances by passing __name__ as the first argument to the Flask class. Most developers do this without thinking, and without knowing what it achieves.

In this article we are going to look at Flask(__name__) in depth. By the end you will not only have a full understanding of this pattern, but you will also know when to deviate from it and pass other values.

This is the third article in my "React + Flask" series, in which I discuss applications that combine a Flask API server with a React single-page application. This time I'm going to show you how to work with the popular React-Router library for React, and in particular how this library affects the production deployment of the application.

This is the third article in my "React + Flask" series. Make sure you read the first and second parts, as this part builds on the project built up to this point.

In this beginner level video I explain what steps you need to take when you get an Internal Server Error in your Flask application.

If you've done any work with SQLite databases you surely know that this database is very limited in terms of making changes to the database schema. When working with a migration framework such as Flask-Migrate, it is common to end up with migration scripts that fail to upgrade or downgrade just because they need to remove or modify a column in a table, something that SQLite does not support.

In this article I'm going to discuss this limitation of the SQLite database, and show you a workaround that is specific to Flask-Migrate and Alembic.

A common need of web applications is to have a periodically running task in the background. This could be a task that imports new data from third party sources, or maybe one that removes revoked tokens from your database once they have expired. In this and many other situations you are faced with the challenge of implementing a task that runs in the background at regular intervals.

This is a pattern that many people ask me about. I've seen implementations that are based on the APScheduler package, on Celery, and even homegrown solutions built inside a background thread. Sadly none of these options are very good. In this article I'm going to show you what I believe is a very robust implementation that is based on the Flask CLI and the cron service.

A common feature in web applications is to let users upload files to the server. The HTTP protocol documents the mechanism for a client to upload a file in RFC 1867, and our favorite web framework Flask fully supports it, but there are many implementation details that fall outside of the formal specification that are unclear for many developers. Things such as where to store uploaded files, how to use them afterwards, or how to protect the server against malicious file uploads generate a lot of confusion and uncertainty.

In this article I'm going to show you how to implement a robust file upload feature for your Flask server that is compatible with the standard file upload support in your web browser as well as the cool JavaScript-based upload widgets:

Sometimes it is useful to quickly access your Flask application running on localhost from another device or location for testing purposes. In this article I'll show you how to use the pyngrok package to provision a temporary public URL for your application that works from your phone or from anywhere in the world!

A question that I frequently get is how to start tracking database migrations with my Flask-Migrate extension when the project has an established database, making it impossible to delete everything and start over from scratch. In this article and companion video I'm going to show you how to set up Flask-Migrate with zero risk for your current database.

Welcome to the second part of my "React + Flask" series. In this episode we are going to deploy our project on a production server!

Have you missed the first part of this tutorial? You can find it here.