.. _app-factories:

Application Factories
=====================

If you are already using packages and blueprints for your application
(:ref:`blueprints`) there are a couple of really nice ways to further improve
the experience.  A common pattern is creating the application object when
the blueprint is imported.  But if you move the creation of this object
into a function, you can then create multiple instances of this app later.

So why would you want to do this?

1.  Testing.  You can have instances of the application with different
    settings to test every case.
2.  Multiple instances.  Imagine you want to run different versions of the
    same application.  Of course you could have multiple instances with
    different configs set up in your webserver, but if you use factories,
    you can have multiple instances of the same application running in the
    same application process which can be handy.

So how would you then actually implement that?

Basic Factories
---------------

The idea is to set up the application in a function.  Like this::

    def create_app(config_filename):
        app = Flask(__name__)
        app.config.from_pyfile(config_filename)

        from yourapplication.model import db
        db.init_app(app)

        from yourapplication.views.admin import admin
        from yourapplication.views.frontend import frontend
        app.register_blueprint(admin)
        app.register_blueprint(frontend)

        return app

The downside is that you cannot use the application object in the blueprints
at import time.  You can however use it from within a request.  How do you
get access to the application with the config?  Use
:data:`~flask.current_app`::

    from flask import current_app, Blueprint, render_template
    admin = Blueprint('admin', __name__, url_prefix='/admin')

    @admin.route('/')
    def index():
        return render_template(current_app.config['INDEX_TEMPLATE'])

Here we look up the name of a template in the config.

Factories & Extensions
----------------------

It's preferable to create your extensions and app factories so that the
extension object does not initially get bound to the application.

Using `Flask-SQLAlchemy <http://flask-sqlalchemy.pocoo.org/>`_,
as an example, you should not do something along those lines::

    def create_app(config_filename):
        app = Flask(__name__)
        app.config.from_pyfile(config_filename)

        db = SQLAlchemy(app)

But, rather, in model.py (or equivalent)::

    db = SQLAlchemy()

and in your application.py (or equivalent)::

    def create_app(config_filename):
        app = Flask(__name__)
        app.config.from_pyfile(config_filename)

        from yourapplication.model import db
        db.init_app(app)

Using this design pattern, no application-specific state is stored on the
extension object, so one extension object can be used for multiple apps.
For more information about the design of extensions refer to :doc:`/extensiondev`.

Using Applications
------------------

To run such an application, you can use the :command:`flask` command::

    $ export FLASK_APP=myapp
    $ flask run
    
Flask will automatically detect the factory (``create_app`` or ``make_app``) 
in ``myapp``. You can also pass arguments to the factory like this::

    $ export FLASK_APP="myapp:create_app('dev')"
    $ flask run
    
Then the ``create_app`` factory in ``myapp`` is called with the string
``'dev'`` as the argument. See :doc:`/cli` for more detail.

Factory Improvements
--------------------

The factory function above is not very clever, but you can improve it.
The following changes are straightforward to implement:

1.  Make it possible to pass in configuration values for unit tests so that
    you don't have to create config files on the filesystem.
2.  Call a function from a blueprint when the application is setting up so
    that you have a place to modify attributes of the application (like
    hooking in before/after request handlers etc.)
3.  Add in WSGI middlewares when the application is being created if necessary.