Almost three years ago I wrote an article on this blog titled Video Streaming with Flask, in which I presented a very modest streaming server that used a Flask generator view function to stream a Motion-JPEG stream to web browsers. My intention with that article was to show a simple, yet practical use of streaming responses, a not very well known feature in Flask.

That article is extremely popular, but not because it teaches how to implement streaming responses, but because a lot of people want to implement streaming video servers. Unfortunately, my focus when I wrote the article was not on creating a robust video server, so I frequently get questions and requests for advice from those who want to use the video server for a real application and quickly find its limitations. So today I'm going to revisit my streaming video server and describe a few improvements I've made to it.

While working on the second edition of my flask book, I was reviewing my Selenium tests, which allow me to automate a web browser and do end-to-end testing. In the current version of the book I recommend running these tests against Firefox. I thought this was a great opportunity to see how Headless Chrome works, as that eliminates the annoying browser window that pops out every time you run the tests.

The results are encouraging. This super short article describes what you need to do to set up Selenium to use the Headless Chrome browser.

If you live anywhere in North America, write down August 21st, 2017 in your calendar. This is the date of the next solar eclipse, one that is of particular interest to us living in this continent, as everybody will be able to experience it in some capacity regardless of location. The map below, from NASA, shows the swath of the United States in which the eclipse will be total, and what percentage of totality you will see anywhere else (click to see a larger version).

In this short article, I want to give you some ideas on how to prepare to view and photograph the eclipse in a way that is safe for you and your camera.

Cookies are the most common attack vector for applications that run on web browsers, yet the topic of how to make cookies secure is frequently overlooked. I touched upon this topic in a few past articles, but today I want to specifically go over all the options Flask and extensions such as Flask-Login and Flask-WTF give you in terms of securing your application against web browser attacks.

Chances are, you were introduced to my blog through the Flask Mega-Tutorial, which is by far, the most popular topic on this blog. If you are doing the tutorial now, I'm sure you noticed that a number of things aren't quite as easy anymore. This is unfortunate, but several of the areas the tutorial touches on have seen significant changes since I published the articles.

The tutorial is now five years old, and embarking on a rewrite to bring it to Python 3.6 and current versions of all other technologies is going to require a considerable amount of time and effort. So I have decided to try a little experiment with a Kckstarter. If you haven't seen this yet, have a look at this video:

The way user sessions are handled in my Flask-SocketIO extension has always been a pain point for me. I tried to make sessions work almost the same as they work on regular Flask routes, but the "almost" part is what makes it confusing for most people.

In this short article and its companion video, I will try to explain why this is not trivial, and also will go over some improvements I just released that I hope will improve the use cases on which users seem to always trip.

I gave a talk titled Handling Authentication Secrets in the Browser at Fluent 2017 in San Jose (you can see the slides above). As a complement to the talk, I thought it would be a good idea to write down the main concepts here on the blog as well, for those that weren't at my talk or those that were, but want to study the topic with more time than the 40 minutes I had for my presentation.

In release 0.11, Flask introduced new command-line functionality based on Click, which includes the flask command. Before then, Flask did not provide any support for building command-line interfaces (CLIs), but Flask-Script provided similar functionality as a third party extension.

It's been more than a year since the Flask CLI has been released, and I still see a lot of projects out there based on Flask-Script. My guess is that there aren't really any important reasons that motivate people to migrate, since Flask-Script worked well, or at least well enough. But the reality is that Flask-Script hasn't had an official release since 2014 and appears to be unmaintained. In this article I want to show you how I migrated the Flasky application from my Flask book from Flask-Script to Click (one of the changes that are coming in the second edition of the book!), so that you can learn what the differences are, and decide if it is time to migrate your applications.

While you work on your Flask application, you normally run the development web server, which provides a basic, yet functional WSGI complaint HTTP server. But eventually you will want to deploy your application for production use, and at that time, one of the many things you will need to decide is if you should require clients to use encrypted connections for added security.

People ask me all the time about this, in particular how to expose a Flask server on HTTPS. In this article I'm going to present several options for adding encryption to a Flask application, going from an extremely simple one that you can implement in just five seconds, to a robust solution that should give you an A+ rating like my site gets from this exhaustive SSL analysis service.

In this short article I'm going to give you an overview of Visual Studio Code, a free and open source IDE for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, from Microsoft. This IDE is highly configurable and extensible with plugins, including a very good one for Python.

Click on this and any of the following screenshots to see a larger image.