How to import from config file in Flask?

Question

I have followed the layout of my Flask project from http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-i-hello-world.

I have the following structure:

app/     __init__.py     views.py     forms.py     myFile.py run.py config.py 

In views.py, forms.py I am able to use

from config import basedir 

However I cannot use that in myFile.py

I added

import Flask  

and when I modify it, the Flask web server restarts, but it doesn't say found changes in app/myFile.py restarting it just restarts.

What do I need to do to be able to use

from config import basedir 

in my python file. I don't see anything special being done in __init__.py for forms.py.

EDIT: This is my __init__.py file:

from flask import Flask from config import basedir  app = Flask(__name__) app.config.from_object('config') from app import views 

Answer 1

When people talk about configs in Flask, they are generally talking about loading values into the app's configuration. In your above example you could have something like app.config.from_object('config') in your init.py file. Then all the configuration values will be loaded into the app.config dictionary.

Then in any of your files you could just import the app object to gain access to that dictionary. I tend to access that app object by doing from flask import current_app as app then just app.config['MY_SETTING'] to get the value I care about. Read up more in the documenation.

Answer 2

After a little bit of fiddling (and a little help from the 'net), I could improve this further, by changing the code to include the config to:

app.config.from_object('config.ProductionConfig') 

This enables this cool pattern for configurations:

class Config(object):     DEBUG = True     DEVELOPMENT = True     SECRET_KEY = 'do-i-really-need-this'     FLASK_HTPASSWD_PATH = '/secret/.htpasswd'     FLASK_SECRET = SECRET_KEY     DB_HOST = 'database' # a docker link  class ProductionConfig(Config):     DEVELOPMENT = False     DEBUG = False     DB_HOST = 'my.production.database' # not a docker link 

What's left now is to see how to integrate testing configs into this, but at least it feels less clumsy.