Flask application factory pattern and testing

This is a project I setup to show the use the application factory pattern in Flask. I set it up because I was stuck while refactoring one of my projects to use the factory pattern. The code would run normally, but my test cases where failing with the following two errors:

RuntimeError: application not registered on db instance and no application bound to current context
RuntimeError: working outside of application context

Most Flask examples don’t use the factory pattern so I spent a lot of time searching around to solve the problem. So I thought I would work it out and share it. Hopefully it saves someone else time.

The problem

Once your project starts to grow, code organization is everything. Flask provides a number of mechanisms for code organization. One of these mechanism’s is blueprints. Combined with the factory pattern provides a nice way to structure and organise code.

Another problem that the factory pattern helps solve is circular dependencies.

Getting the factory pattern to work isn’t hard. Getting it to work correctly, it turned out, was a little harder. The problem I had was caused in the testing code. In the following section I will briefly explain how to setup and use the factory pattern correctly.

Lessons learned

I have added more code than strictly necessary to show the concept of the factory pattern working as a realistic example.

The structure and contents of this example project is:

src
│ .gitignore
│ readme.md
│ manage.py
│ requirements.txt
├── instance
│   sensitive.cfg
├── test_app_factory
│   │ __init__.py
│   │   appliction.py
│   │   config.py
│   │   extensions.py
│   │   models.py
│   ├── helpers
│   │   __init__.py
│   │   misc.py
│   ├── module
│   │   __init__.py
│   │   viws.py
│   ├── static
│   │   favicon-16x16.png
│   │   favicon-32x32.png
│   └── templates
│   index.html
└── tests
    test_basics.py

Okay, what’s important to point out here?

The core of the factory pattern is setup in application.py and extensions.py. All extensions are initialized in extensions.py. If you add additional extensions make sure to add them to the import statement in test_app_factory/__init__.py. This is a convent way to shorten import statements.

The actual heavy lifting is done in application.py. Each part of the application initialization is a separate function, which are called by the main function app_factory. This function takes a string, which specifies the environment the configuration should be loaded for. The configuration is defined in config.py.

The factory pattern in application.py looks like this:

def app_factory(config, name):
app = Flask(...)

...

return app

The function calls a number of functions that load the configuration settings, extensions, blueprints, etc.

Using the factory is really easy, just use the following call:

app = app_factory('TST')

To access the app object in modules after the application has been initialized is done using the proxy provided by Flask:

from flask import current_app as app

Now for the part that was driving met crazy, the testing code. I still do not understand fully why it is the only place in my code that was causing a problem, probably has to do with the way unittest works. Anyway, to get the factory pattern to work you need to add app_context to specific statements. Here is an example.

class TestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    @classmethod
    def setUpClass(cls):
        cls.app = app_factory('TST')

    def setUp(self):
        with self.app.app_context():
            self.client = app.test_client()
            db.create_all()

    def tearDown(self):
        with self.app.app_context():
            db.session.remove()
            db.drop_all()

    def test_add_user(self):
        with self.app.app_context():
            db.session.add(User(name='test user', email='test@mail.com'))
            db.session.commit()

Conclusion

Finding good examples isn’t always easy. The factory pattern can really help to organize the code and make it more readable and maintainable.

Any suggestions how I can further improve the code? I would love to hear from you!

Flask error loading config file in instance directory

I have been dealing with a really frustrating problem today. Yesterday my code was working and today it was failed without any code changes.

This is the piece of code causing the problem.

app = Flask(__name__, instance_relative_config=True)
app.config.from_object('config')
app.config.from_pyfile('config.cfg')

And this is the error.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "run.py", line 1, in 
    from project import app
  File "C:\Python27\env\vod_test\src\project\__init__.py", line 37, in 
    load_config()
  File "C:\Python27\env\vod_test\src\project\__init__.py", line 33, in load_config
    app.config.from_pyfile('config.cfg')
  File "C:\Python27\env\vod_test\lib\site-packages\flask\config.py", line 129, in from_pyfile
    with open(filename) as config_file:
IOError: [Errno 2] Unable to load configuration file (No such file or directory): 'C:\\Python27\\env\\vod_test\\var\\project-instance\\config.cfg'

Flask is trying to load the config file from C:\\Python27\\env\\vod_test\\var\\project-instance\\config.cfg instead of from C:\\Python27\\env\\vod_test\\project\\instance\\config.cfg. Where is the var coming from? And why is there a hyphen between project and instance?

The strange thing was that the problem only occurred when I was running my test cases from the command line. In PyCharm the code was working. How frustrating. It turned out that PyCharm was using a different virtualenv than the command line. After comparing the output of ‘pip freeze’ I discovered that some libraries had different versions.

To solve the problem I added the following code.

import os
from flask import Flask


def load_instance_config_fix(filename):
    config = {}
    with app.open_instance_resource(filename) as f:
        for line in f:
            if line[0] == "#":
                continue
            name, value = line.partition("=")[::2]
            config[name.strip()] = value.strip()
    return config


def handle_incorrect_instance_path(f):
    def handle_load_instance_config():
        try:
            f()
        except IOError:
            app.instance_path = os.path.join(os.path.abspath(os.curdir), 'instance')
            config = load_instance_config_fix('config.cfg')
            app.config.update(config)

    return handle_load_instance_config


@handle_incorrect_instance_path
def load_config():
    app.config.from_object('config')
    app.config.from_pyfile('config.cfg')


app = Flask(__name__, instance_relative_config=True)

load_config()


@app.route('/')
def hello_world():
    return 'Hello, World!'

Just some nice syntactic sugar with a decorator to keep the code nice and concise.

Another way to solve the problem is by setting the instance_path when initializing Flask. What fun would that be 🙂

import os
from flask import Flask


app = Flask(__name__, instance_path=os.path.join(os.path.abspath(os.curdir), 'instance'), instance_relative_config=True)
app.config.from_object('config')
app.config.from_pyfile('config.cfg')


@app.route('/')
def hello_world():
    return 'Hello, World!'

Back to real coding 🙂

Quick test Flask, Flask-Restplus and Flask-Marshmallow

I needed to quickly test a few things today using Flask, Flask-Restplus and Flask-Marshmallow. I created the following boilerplate code that can easily be modified for further quick tests.

from flask import Flask, Blueprint, url_for, jsonify
from flask_restplus import Api, Resource
from flask_marshmallow import Marshmallow, base_fields
from marshmallow import post_dump

# Setup Flask app

url_prefix = '/api/v4'
doc = '/apidoc/'
app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['JSON_SORT_KEYS'] = False
ma = Marshmallow()
blueprint = Blueprint('api', __name__, url_prefix=url_prefix)
api = Api(blueprint, doc=doc, version='3.0')

# Models

class Bunch(dict):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(Bunch, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.__dict__ = self

class Author(Bunch):
    pass

def mock_author():
    author = Author(id=123, name='Fred Douglass')
    return author

def mock_author_list():
    a1 = Author(id=1, name="Alice")
    a2 = Author(id=2, name="Bob")
    a3 = Author(id=3, name="Carol")
    return [a1, a2, a3]

# Schemas

class AuthorSchema(ma.Schema):
    id = base_fields.Int(dump_only=True)

    absolute_url = ma.AbsoluteURLFor('api.author', id='<id>')

    links = ma.Hyperlinks({
        'self': ma.URLFor('api.author', id='<id>'),
        'collection': ma.URLFor('api.authors')
    })

    @post_dump(pass_many=True)
    def wrap(self, data, many):
        key = 'authors' if many else 'author'
        return {
            key: data
        }

    class Meta:
        fields = ('id', 'name', 'links', 'absolute_url')
        ordered = True

# Setup operations

ns = api.namespace('authors', description='desc')
ep_1 = 'authors'
ep_2 = 'author'

@ns.route('/', endpoint=ep_1)
class AuthorsCollection(Resource):
    def get(self):
        print " ---- GET - result=" + url_for('api.' + ep_1)
        s = AuthorSchema(many=True)
        result = s.dump(mock_author_list())
        return jsonify(result.data)

    def post(self):
        print " ---- POST - result=" + url_for('api.' + ep_1)
        return None, 201

@ns.route('/<int:id>', endpoint=ep_2)
class AuthorsDetail(Resource):
    def get(self, id):
        print " ---- GET - result=" + url_for('api.' + ep_2, id=id)
        print " ---- GET - result=" + url_for('api.' + ep_1)
        s = AuthorSchema()
        result = s.dump(mock_author())
        return jsonify(result.data)

    def put(self, id):
        print " ---- PUT - result=" + url_for('api.' + ep_2, id=id)
        print " ---- PUT - result=" + url_for('api.' + ep_1)
        return None, 204

    def delete(self, id):
        print " ---- DELETE - result=" + url_for('api.' + ep_2, id=id)
        print " ---- DELETE - result=" + url_for('api.' + ep_1)
        return None, 204

app.register_blueprint(blueprint)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print '>>>>> Starting server at http://localhost:8080{url_prefix}{doc}'.\
        format(url_prefix=url_prefix, doc=doc)
    app.run(port=8080, debug=True)

Marshmallow not respecting ordered=True

I had a little fight with Marshmallow and the ordered=True in class Meta. When ordered=True is set the fields should be outputed in the order specified in the property fields of the class Meta.

Example:

class AuthorSchema(ma.Schema):
    id = base_fields.Int(dump_only=True)

    absolute_url = ma.AbsoluteURLFor('api.author', id='<id>')

    links = ma.Hyperlinks({
        'self': ma.URLFor('api.author', id='<id>'),
        'collection': ma.URLFor('api.authors')
    })

    @post_dump(pass_many=True)
    def wrap(self, data, many):
        key = 'authors' if many else 'author'
        return {
            key: data
        }

    class Meta:
        fields = (
            'id',
            'name',
            'links',
            'absolute_url',
        )
        ordered = True

This was the output.

{
  "author": {
    "absolute_url": "http://localhost:8080/api/v4/authors/123",
    "id": 123,
    "links": {
      "collection": "/api/v4/authors/",
      "self": "/api/v4/authors/123"
    },
    "name": "Fred Douglass"
  }
}

After some Googeling I found out that the culprit was Flask.jsonify. It orders output alphabetically by default. The following setting switches this off.

app.config['JSON_SORT_KEYS'] = False

After this the output was in the specified order.

{
  "author": {
    "id": 123,
    "name": "Fred Douglass",
    "links": {
      "self": "/api/v4/authors/123",
      "collection": "/api/v4/authors/"
    },
    "absolute_url": "http://localhost:8080/api/v4/authors/123"
  }
}

Hope this saves someone else time.

More Flask debugging tricks

I was busy debugging a rest services I’m building in Flask and Flask-Restplus. I needed a way to log the request and response. I found some code that can be used as a wrapper of the WSGI application that does just this.

Create a file called dubug.py that contains the following code.

import pprint

class RequestLoggingWrapper(object):
    def __init__(self, app):
        self._app = app

    def __call__(self, environ, resp):
        errorlog = environ['wsgi.errors']
        pprint.pprint(('REQUEST', environ), stream=errorlog)

        def log_response(status, headers, *args):
            pprint.pprint(('RESPONSE', status, headers), stream=errorlog)
            return resp(status, headers, *args)

        return self._app(environ, log_response)

This wrapper works independently from Flask and wraps the WSGI application. It shows exactly what request is going in and what response is going out.

When running Flask with the built-in server you can use it as follows.

from debug import RequestLoggingWrapper

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.wsgi_app = RequestLoggingWrapper(app.wsgi_app)
    app.run()

The output goes to the wgi.error stream. For the built Flask server it is printed to stderr.

Flask request debugging

I needed to debug the Flask request. After googeling around for a while I ran into a cool trick on Stack Overflow using the pprint module. The pprint module provides a capability to “pretty-print” arbitrary Python data structures in a form which can be used as input to the interpreter.

import pprint
str = pprint.pformat(request.environ, depth=5)

This same trick can be used with all the Flask variables.

  • request.args: the key/value pairs in the URL query string
  • request.form: the key/value pairs in the body, as sent by a HTML POST form
  • request.files: the files in the body, which Flask keeps separate from form
  • request.values: combined args and form, preferring args if keys overlap