Flask Tutorial - The Beginning written: October 31, 2011

What’s to come.

Hello. And welcome back. I am expecting to write a few blog posts about the journy I am about to take. I have gotten it in my head that it would be a good idea to work through a Python clone of Hacker News. I wrote about the idea of news.GISQuery here and I thought it would be a great idea to write about my experiences as I build the site.

I am not sure how this is going to go or even how well it is going to work, but I thought that we can all learn something together. I am in the learning profession and feel that learning python while showing people my growing pains will be a great opportunity. Let people learn through my learning process.

What’s Done is Done

I am not going to lie. I have some experience with both Python and the Flask micro-framework, so I am not starting this from scratch. I have build BeerLedge using Flask, and have been toying with it a lot lately. However, I want to do a lot of things with this project that will push the boundry of my knowledge. This won’t be so much a website (though that is the ultimate goal), but this will also be a framework for people who want to create such websites using Flask.

So, what does this mean? It means that I have created a project on GitHub called Flacker-News, and it is this project that we are going to work on throughout these blog posts. I am hoping that I could use the power of GitHub for good and have more people follow along with the progress of Flacker-News.

Preperation

If you want to follow along with these tutorials, please get comfortable with the Flask micro-framework. The documentation is great and should be able to get you up to speed. Flask is quite easy to get up and running, and I have fallen in love with it! Below is all you need to get a Flask website up and running.

$ easy_install Flask
$ python hello.py
 * Running on http://localhost:5000/

from flask import Flask
 app = Flask(__name__)
 	
@app.route("/")
def hello():
    return "Hello World!"
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

So I hope that this series will be fruitful for both you and me!