Motivation

We are currently migrating our projects from django to flask. Since we also intend to use flask for entirely new projects, it made sense to save on initial setup time. So we created a project skeleton which includes some of the things (libs and configuration) that we pick for most projects.

Components

General

here is a list of assembled components

• flask decorators for (cache_page, login_required)
• gae specific monkeypatch for werkzeug debugger http://dev.pocoo.org/projects/werkzeug/wiki/UsingDebuggerWithAppEngine
• a simple user model
• google appengine specific development/production environment switch
• google appengine appstats configured
• google appengine memcache caching backend configured
• favicon.ico stub to avoid unneeded error logs
• deck module with 26 char uuid generator
• deck module with JsonProperty for the datastore
• lib directory for external dependencies prepended to syspath

Libraries

Python

• Flask 0.6
• Jinja 2.5.2
• werkzeug 0.6.2
• Facebook python sdk (commit 2da0f678f0c0c5a5ddc77b7456dde232e9b98bd9)
• gaeUtils from deck http://github.com/deck/gae-utils
• gaePath http://github.com/nikgraf/gae-path

Dependencies

General

• Python 2.5
• Google AppEngine SDK http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html

Testing

• lxml http://pypi.python.org/pypi/lxml
• nose http://pypi.python.org/pypi/nose
• NoseGAE http://pypi.python.org/pypi/NoseGAE
• selenium 2+ http://pypi.python.org/pypi/selenium

Setup

• fetch all the submodules via:

  git submodule update --init

• set your own appengine application id in app.yaml

• change the 'secret_key' in settings.py

Usage

Run Application

Go to path "code" and run

dev_appserver.py .

Run Test Enviroment

Go to path "code" and run

nosetests-2.5 --with-gae tests/

Run Remote Console

Go to path "code" and run

python2.5 appengine_console.py <app-id>

TODO

things we still need to extract and clean up from other projects

• add tests for decorators
• set port for testing via configuration in settings or test_settings
• kill subprocess dev_appserver for selenium tests also in windows (see python2.6 implementation how to kill a process)
• add coverage
• add csrf
• add fixture (http://farmdev.com/projects/fixture/using-fixture-with-appengine.html)