New in version 0.7.
Flask uses a concept of blueprints for making application components and
supporting common patterns within an application or across applications.
Blueprints can greatly simplify how large applications work and provide a
central means for Flask extensions to register operations on applications.
A Blueprint
object works similarly to a Flask
application object, but it is not actually an application. Rather it is a
blueprint of how to construct or extend an application.
Why Blueprints?
Blueprints in Flask are intended for these cases:
- Factor an application into a set of blueprints. This is ideal for larger applications; a project could instantiate an application object, initialize several extensions, and register a collection of blueprints.
- Register a blueprint on an application at a URL prefix and/or subdomain. Parameters in the URL prefix/subdomain become common view arguments (with defaults) across all view functions in the blueprint.
- Register a blueprint multiple times on an application with different URL rules.
- Provide template filters, static files, templates, and other utilities through blueprints. A blueprint does not have to implement applications or view functions.
- Register a blueprint on an application for any of these cases when initializing a Flask extension.
A blueprint in Flask is not a pluggable app because it is not actually an application – it’s a set of operations which can be registered on an application, even multiple times. Why not have multiple application objects? You can do that (see Application Dispatching), but your applications will have separate configs and will be managed at the WSGI layer.
Blueprints instead provide separation at the Flask level, share application config, and can change an application object as necessary with being registered. The downside is that you cannot unregister a blueprint once an application was created without having to destroy the whole application object.
The Concept of Blueprints
The basic concept of blueprints is that they record operations to execute when registered on an application. Flask associates view functions with blueprints when dispatching requests and generating URLs from one endpoint to another.
My First Blueprint
This is what a very basic blueprint looks like. In this case we want to implement a blueprint that does simple rendering of static templates:
from flask import Blueprint, render_template, abort
from jinja2 import TemplateNotFound
simple_page = Blueprint('simple_page', __name__,
template_folder='templates')
@simple_page.route('/', defaults={'page': 'index'})
@simple_page.route('/<page>')
def show(page):
try:
return render_template('pages/%s.html' % page)
except TemplateNotFound:
abort(404)
When you bind a function with the help of the @simple_page.route
decorator the blueprint will record the intention of registering the
function [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] on the application when it’s later registered.
Additionally it will prefix the endpoint of the function with the
name of the blueprint which was given to the Blueprint
constructor (in this case also simple_page
).
Registering Blueprints
So how do you register that blueprint? Like this:
from flask import Flask
from yourapplication.simple_page import simple_page
app = Flask(__name__)
app.register_blueprint(simple_page)
If you check the rules registered on the application, you will find these:
[<Rule '/static/<filename>' (HEAD, OPTIONS, GET) -> static>,
<Rule '/<page>' (HEAD, OPTIONS, GET) -> simple_page.show>,
<Rule '/' (HEAD, OPTIONS, GET) -> simple_page.show>]
The first one is obviously from the application itself for the static
files. The other two are for the [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] function of the simple_page
blueprint. As you can see, they are also prefixed with the name of the
blueprint and separated by a dot (.
).
Blueprints however can also be mounted at different locations:
app.register_blueprint(simple_page, url_prefix='/pages')
And sure enough, these are the generated rules:
[<Rule '/static/<filename>' (HEAD, OPTIONS, GET) -> static>,
<Rule '/pages/<page>' (HEAD, OPTIONS, GET) -> simple_page.show>,
<Rule '/pages/' (HEAD, OPTIONS, GET) -> simple_page.show>]
On top of that you can register blueprints multiple times though not every blueprint might respond properly to that. In fact it depends on how the blueprint is implemented if it can be mounted more than once.
Blueprint Resources
Blueprints can provide resources as well. Sometimes you might want to introduce a blueprint only for the resources it provides.
Blueprint Resource Folder
Like for regular applications, blueprints are considered to be contained in a folder. While multiple blueprints can originate from the same folder, it does not have to be the case and it’s usually not recommended.
The folder is inferred from the second argument to Blueprint
which
is usually [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference]. This argument specifies what logical Python
module or package corresponds to the blueprint. If it points to an actual
Python package that package (which is a folder on the filesystem) is the
resource folder. If it’s a module, the package the module is contained in
will be the resource folder. You can access the
Blueprint.root_path
property to see what the resource folder is:
>>> simple_page.root_path
'/Users/username/TestProject/yourapplication'
To quickly open sources from this folder you can use the
open_resource()
function:
with simple_page.open_resource('static/style.css') as f:
code = f.read()
Static Files
A blueprint can expose a folder with static files by providing a path to a folder on the filesystem via the [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] keyword argument. It can either be an absolute path or one relative to the folder of the blueprint:
admin = Blueprint('admin', __name__, static_folder='static')
By default the rightmost part of the path is where it is exposed on the
web. Because the folder is called static
here it will be available at
the location of the blueprint + /static
. Say the blueprint is
registered for /admin
the static folder will be at /admin/static
.
The endpoint is named [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] so you can generate URLs to it like you would do to the static folder of the application:
url_for('admin.static', filename='style.css')
Templates
If you want the blueprint to expose templates you can do that by providing
the [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] parameter to the Blueprint
constructor:
admin = Blueprint('admin', __name__, template_folder='templates')
For static files, the path can be absolute or relative to the blueprint resource folder.
The template folder is added to the search path of templates but with a lower priority than the actual application’s template folder. That way you can easily override templates that a blueprint provides in the actual application. This also means that if you don’t want a blueprint template to be accidentally overridden, make sure that no other blueprint or actual application template has the same relative path. When multiple blueprints provide the same relative template path the first blueprint registered takes precedence over the others.
So if you have a blueprint in the folder yourapplication/admin
and you
want to render the template 'admin/index.html'
and you have provided
templates
as a [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] you will have to create a file like
this: yourapplication/admin/templates/admin/index.html
. The reason
for the extra admin
folder is to avoid getting our template overridden
by a template named index.html
in the actual application template
folder.
To further reiterate this: if you have a blueprint named admin
and you
want to render a template called index.html
which is specific to this
blueprint, the best idea is to lay out your templates like this:
yourpackage/
blueprints/
admin/
templates/
admin/
index.html
__init__.py
And then when you want to render the template, use admin/index.html
as
the name to look up the template by. If you encounter problems loading
the correct templates enable the EXPLAIN_TEMPLATE_LOADING
config
variable which will instruct Flask to print out the steps it goes through
to locate templates on every render_template
call.
Building URLs
If you want to link from one page to another you can use the
url_for()
function just like you normally would do just that you
prefix the URL endpoint with the name of the blueprint and a dot (.
):
url_for('admin.index')
Additionally if you are in a view function of a blueprint or a rendered template and you want to link to another endpoint of the same blueprint, you can use relative redirects by prefixing the endpoint with a dot only:
url_for('.index')
This will link to admin.index
for instance in case the current request
was dispatched to any other admin blueprint endpoint.
Error Handlers
Blueprints support the errorhandler decorator just like the Flask
application object, so it is easy to make Blueprint-specific custom error
pages.
Here is an example for a “404 Page Not Found” exception:
@simple_page.errorhandler(404)
def page_not_found(e):
return render_template('pages/404.html')
Most errorhandlers will simply work as expected; however, there is a caveat
concerning handlers for 404 and 405 exceptions. These errorhandlers are only
invoked from an appropriate raise
statement or a call to abort
in another
of the blueprint’s view functions; they are not invoked by, e.g., an invalid URL
access. This is because the blueprint does not “own” a certain URL space, so
the application instance has no way of knowing which blueprint errorhandler it
should run if given an invalid URL. If you would like to execute different
handling strategies for these errors based on URL prefixes, they may be defined
at the application level using the request
proxy object:
@app.errorhandler(404)
@app.errorhandler(405)
def _handle_api_error(ex):
if request.path.startswith('/api/'):
return jsonify_error(ex)
else:
return ex
More information on error handling see Custom Error Pages.