Can I serve multiple clients using just Flask app.run() as standalone?

Question

flask.Flask.run accepts additional keyword arguments (**options) that it forwards to werkzeug.serving.run_simple - two of those arguments are threaded (a boolean) and processes (which you can set to a number greater than one to have werkzeug spawn more than one process to handle requests).

threaded defaults to True as of Flask 1.0, so for the latest versions of Flask, the default development server will be able to serve multiple clients simultaneously by default. For older versions of Flask, you can explicitly pass threaded=True to enable this behaviour.

For example, you can do

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(threaded=True)

to handle multiple clients using threads in a way compatible with old Flask versions, or

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(threaded=False, processes=3)

to tell Werkzeug to spawn three processes to handle incoming requests, or just

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

to handle multiple clients using threads if you know that you will be using Flask 1.0 or later.

That being said, Werkzeug's serving.run_simple wraps the standard library's wsgiref package - and that package contains a reference implementation of WSGI, not a production-ready web server. If you are going to use Flask in production (assuming that "production" is not a low-traffic internal application with no more than 10 concurrent users) make sure to stand it up behind a real web server (see the section of Flask's docs entitled Deployment Options for some suggested methods).

Using the simple app.run() from within Flask creates a single synchronous server on a single thread capable of serving only one client at a time. It is intended for use in controlled environments with low demand (i.e. development, debugging) for exactly this reason.

Spawning threads and managing them yourself is probably not going to get you very far either, because of the Python GIL.

That said, you do still have some good options. Gunicorn is a solid, easy-to-use WSGI server that will let you spawn multiple workers (separate processes, so no GIL worries), and even comes with asynchronous workers that will speed up your app (and make it more secure) with little to no work on your part (especially with Flask).

Still, even Gunicorn should probably not be directly publicly exposed. In production, it should be used behind a more robust HTTP server; nginx tends to go well with Gunicorn and Flask.

Tips from 2020:

From Flask 1.0, it defaults to enable multiple threads (source), you don't need to do anything, just upgrade it with:

$ pip install -U flask

If you are using flask run instead of app.run() with older versions, you can control the threaded behavior with a command option (--with-threads/--without-threads):

$ flask run --with-threads

It's same as app.run(threaded=True)