Question

I have been developing by pushing to Heroku – this is a little time consuming.

What is a faster approach to develop – using Flask?

Answer 1

The simplest way is to develop on your own machine is to run it locally:

$ cd directory/containing/your/project
your/project$ python your_flask_app.py
* Running on 127.0.0.1:5000

Make sure that your app.run call has the keyword argument debug set to True so you get automatic reloading when you edit your application. (e. g. app.run(debug=True)).

You can now visit localhost:5000 in your browser and edit the files on disk and see immediate changes (and errors).

If you don’t already have Flask installed on your local machine this may fail with an ImportError. In which case, simply ensure that you have virtualenv and pip installed on your machine and then do the following:

# Linux / Mac
your/project$ virtualenv --distribute venv
your/project$ source venv/bin/activate  # Alternately, you can use the . command
(venv) your/project$ pip install -r requirements.txt
(venv) your/project$ python your_flask_app.py

# Windows
your/project> virtualenv --distribute venv
your/project> venv\Scripts\activate
(venv) your/project> pip install -r requirements.txt
(venv) your/project> python your_flask_app.py