Applications need some kind of configuration. There are different settings you might want to change depending on the application environment like toggling the debug mode, setting the secret key, and other such environment-specific things.
The way Flask is designed usually requires the configuration to be available when the application starts up. You can hardcode the configuration in the code, which for many small applications is not actually that bad, but there are better ways.
Independent of how you load your config, there is a config object
available which holds the loaded configuration values:
The config
attribute of the Flask
object. This is the place where Flask itself puts certain configuration
values and also where extensions can put their configuration values. But
this is also where you can have your own configuration.
Configuration Basics
The config
is actually a subclass of a dictionary and
can be modified just like any dictionary:
app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['TESTING'] = True
Certain configuration values are also forwarded to the
Flask
object so you can read and write them from there:
app.testing = True
To update multiple keys at once you can use the dict.update()
method:
app.config.update(
TESTING=True,
SECRET_KEY=b'_5#y2L"F4Q8z\n\xec]/'
)
Environment and Debug Features
The ENV
and DEBUG
config values are special because they
may behave inconsistently if changed after the app has begun setting up.
In order to set the environment and debug mode reliably, Flask uses
environment variables.
The environment is used to indicate to Flask, extensions, and other
programs, like Sentry, what context Flask is running in. It is
controlled with the FLASK_ENV
environment variable and
defaults to production
.
Setting FLASK_ENV
to development
will enable debug mode.
flask run
will use the interactive debugger and reloader by default
in debug mode. To control this separately from the environment, use the
FLASK_DEBUG
flag.
Changed in version 1.0: Added FLASK_ENV
to control the environment separately
from debug mode. The development environment enables debug mode.
To switch Flask to the development environment and enable debug mode,
set FLASK_ENV
:
$ export FLASK_ENV=development
$ flask run
(On Windows, use set
instead of export
.)
Using the environment variables as described above is recommended. While
it is possible to set ENV
and DEBUG
in your config or
code, this is strongly discouraged. They can’t be read early by the
flask
command, and some systems or extensions may have already
configured themselves based on a previous value.
Builtin Configuration Values
The following configuration values are used internally by Flask:
ENV
What environment the app is running in. Flask and extensions may
enable behaviors based on the environment, such as enabling debug
mode. The env
attribute maps to this config
key. This is set by the FLASK_ENV
environment variable and
may not behave as expected if set in code.
Do not enable development when deploying in production.
Default: 'production'
New in version 1.0.
DEBUG
Whether debug mode is enabled. When using flask run
to start the
development server, an interactive debugger will be shown for
unhandled exceptions, and the server will be reloaded when code
changes. The debug
attribute maps to this
config key. This is enabled when ENV
is 'development'
and is overridden by the FLASK_DEBUG
environment variable. It
may not behave as expected if set in code.
Do not enable debug mode when deploying in production.
Default: True
if ENV
is 'production'
, or False
otherwise.
TESTING
Enable testing mode. Exceptions are propagated rather than handled by the the app’s error handlers. Extensions may also change their behavior to facilitate easier testing. You should enable this in your own tests.
Default: False
PROPAGATE_EXCEPTIONS
Exceptions are re-raised rather than being handled by the app’s error
handlers. If not set, this is implicitly true if TESTING
or DEBUG
is enabled.
Default: None
PRESERVE_CONTEXT_ON_EXCEPTION
Don’t pop the request context when an exception occurs. If not set, this
is true if DEBUG
is true. This allows debuggers to introspect the
request data on errors, and should normally not need to be set directly.
Default: None
TRAP_HTTP_EXCEPTIONS
If there is no handler for an HTTPException
-type exception, re-raise it
to be handled by the interactive debugger instead of returning it as a
simple error response.
Default: False
TRAP_BAD_REQUEST_ERRORS
Trying to access a key that doesn’t exist from request dicts like args
and form
will return a 400 Bad Request error page. Enable this to treat
the error as an unhandled exception instead so that you get the interactive
debugger. This is a more specific version of TRAP_HTTP_EXCEPTIONS
. If
unset, it is enabled in debug mode.
Default: None
SECRET_KEY
A secret key that will be used for securely signing the session cookie and can be used for any other security related needs by extensions or your application. It should be a long random string of bytes, although unicode is accepted too. For example, copy the output of this to your config:
python -c 'import os; print(os.urandom(16))'
b'_5#y2L"F4Q8z\n\xec]/'
Do not reveal the secret key when posting questions or committing code.
Default: None
SESSION_COOKIE_NAME
The name of the session cookie. Can be changed in case you already have a cookie with the same name.
Default: 'session'
SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN
The domain match rule that the session cookie will be valid for. If not
set, the cookie will be valid for all subdomains of SERVER_NAME
.
If False
, the cookie’s domain will not be set.
Default: None
SESSION_COOKIE_PATH
The path that the session cookie will be valid for. If not set, the cookie
will be valid underneath APPLICATION_ROOT
or /
if that is not set.
Default: None
SESSION_COOKIE_HTTPONLY
Browsers will not allow JavaScript access to cookies marked as “HTTP only” for security.
Default: True
SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE
Browsers will only send cookies with requests over HTTPS if the cookie is marked “secure”. The application must be served over HTTPS for this to make sense.
Default: False
SESSION_COOKIE_SAMESITE
Restrict how cookies are sent with requests from external sites. Can
be set to 'Lax'
(recommended) or 'Strict'
.
See Set-Cookie options.
Default: None
New in version 1.0.
PERMANENT_SESSION_LIFETIME
If session.permanent
is true, the cookie’s expiration will be set this
number of seconds in the future. Can either be a
datetime.timedelta
or an int
.
Flask’s default cookie implementation validates that the cryptographic signature is not older than this value.
Default: timedelta(days=31)
(2678400
seconds)
SESSION_REFRESH_EACH_REQUEST
Control whether the cookie is sent with every response when
session.permanent
is true. Sending the cookie every time (the default)
can more reliably keep the session from expiring, but uses more bandwidth.
Non-permanent sessions are not affected.
Default: True
USE_X_SENDFILE
When serving files, set the X-Sendfile
header instead of serving the
data with Flask. Some web servers, such as Apache, recognize this and serve
the data more efficiently. This only makes sense when using such a server.
Default: False
SEND_FILE_MAX_AGE_DEFAULT
When serving files, set the cache control max age to this number of
seconds. Can either be a datetime.timedelta
or an int
.
Override this value on a per-file basis using
get_send_file_max_age()
on the application or blueprint.
Default: timedelta(hours=12)
(43200
seconds)
SERVER_NAME
Inform the application what host and port it is bound to. Required for subdomain route matching support.
If set, will be used for the session cookie domain if
SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN
is not set. Modern web browsers will
not allow setting cookies for domains without a dot. To use a domain
locally, add any names that should route to the app to your
hosts
file.
127.0.0.1 localhost.dev
If set, url_for
can generate external URLs with only an application
context instead of a request context.
Default: None
APPLICATION_ROOT
Inform the application what path it is mounted under by the application / web server.
Will be used for the session cookie path if SESSION_COOKIE_PATH
is not
set.
Default: '/'
PREFERRED_URL_SCHEME
Use this scheme for generating external URLs when not in a request context.
Default: 'http'
MAX_CONTENT_LENGTH
Don’t read more than this many bytes from the incoming request data. If not
set and the request does not specify a CONTENT_LENGTH
, no data will be
read for security.
Default: None
JSON_AS_ASCII
Serialize objects to ASCII-encoded JSON. If this is disabled, the JSON
will be returned as a Unicode string, or encoded as UTF-8
by
jsonify
. This has security implications when rendering the JSON in
to JavaScript in templates, and should typically remain enabled.
Default: True
JSON_SORT_KEYS
Sort the keys of JSON objects alphabetically. This is useful for caching because it ensures the data is serialized the same way no matter what Python’s hash seed is. While not recommended, you can disable this for a possible performance improvement at the cost of caching.
Default: True
JSONIFY_PRETTYPRINT_REGULAR
jsonify
responses will be output with newlines, spaces, and indentation
for easier reading by humans. Always enabled in debug mode.
Default: False
JSONIFY_MIMETYPE
The mimetype of jsonify
responses.
Default: 'application/json'
TEMPLATES_AUTO_RELOAD
Reload templates when they are changed. If not set, it will be enabled in debug mode.
Default: None
EXPLAIN_TEMPLATE_LOADING
Log debugging information tracing how a template file was loaded. This can be useful to figure out why a template was not loaded or the wrong file appears to be loaded.
Default: False
New in version 0.4: LOGGER_NAME
New in version 0.5: SERVER_NAME
New in version 0.6: MAX_CONTENT_LENGTH
New in version 0.7: PROPAGATE_EXCEPTIONS
, PRESERVE_CONTEXT_ON_EXCEPTION
New in version 0.8: TRAP_BAD_REQUEST_ERRORS
, TRAP_HTTP_EXCEPTIONS
,
APPLICATION_ROOT
, SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN
,
SESSION_COOKIE_PATH
, SESSION_COOKIE_HTTPONLY
,
SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE
New in version 0.9: PREFERRED_URL_SCHEME
New in version 0.10: JSON_AS_ASCII
, JSON_SORT_KEYS
, JSONIFY_PRETTYPRINT_REGULAR
New in version 0.11: SESSION_REFRESH_EACH_REQUEST
, TEMPLATES_AUTO_RELOAD
,
LOGGER_HANDLER_POLICY
, EXPLAIN_TEMPLATE_LOADING
Changed in version 1.0: LOGGER_NAME
and LOGGER_HANDLER_POLICY
were removed. See
Logging for information about configuration.
Added ENV
to reflect the FLASK_ENV
environment
variable.
Added SESSION_COOKIE_SAMESITE
to control the session
cookie’s SameSite
option.
Configuring from Files
Configuration becomes more useful if you can store it in a separate file, ideally located outside the actual application package. This makes packaging and distributing your application possible via various package handling tools (Deploying with Setuptools) and finally modifying the configuration file afterwards.
So a common pattern is this:
app = Flask(__name__)
app.config.from_object('yourapplication.default_settings')
app.config.from_envvar('YOURAPPLICATION_SETTINGS')
This first loads the configuration from the
[UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] module and then overrides the values
with the contents of the file the YOURAPPLICATION_SETTINGS
environment variable points to. This environment variable can be set on
Linux or OS X with the export command in the shell before starting the
server:
$ export YOURAPPLICATION_SETTINGS=/path/to/settings.cfg
$ python run-app.py
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/
* Restarting with reloader...
On Windows systems use the [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] builtin instead:
>set YOURAPPLICATION_SETTINGS=\path\to\settings.cfg
The configuration files themselves are actual Python files. Only values in uppercase are actually stored in the config object later on. So make sure to use uppercase letters for your config keys.
Here is an example of a configuration file:
# Example configuration
DEBUG = False
SECRET_KEY = b'_5#y2L"F4Q8z\n\xec]/'
Make sure to load the configuration very early on, so that extensions have
the ability to access the configuration when starting up. There are other
methods on the config object as well to load from individual files. For a
complete reference, read the Config
object’s
documentation.
Configuring from Environment Variables
In addition to pointing to configuration files using environment variables, you may find it useful (or necessary) to control your configuration values directly from the environment.
Environment variables can be set on Linux or OS X with the export command in the shell before starting the server:
$ export SECRET_KEY='5f352379324c22463451387a0aec5d2f'
$ export DEBUG=False
$ python run-app.py
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/
* Restarting with reloader...
On Windows systems use the [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] builtin instead:
>set SECRET_KEY='5f352379324c22463451387a0aec5d2f'
>set DEBUG=False
While this approach is straightforward to use, it is important to remember that environment variables are strings – they are not automatically deserialized into Python types.
Here is an example of a configuration file that uses environment variables:
# Example configuration
import os
ENVIRONMENT_DEBUG = os.environ.get("DEBUG", default=False)
if ENVIRONMENT_DEBUG.lower() in ("f", "false"):
ENVIRONMENT_DEBUG = False
DEBUG = ENVIRONMENT_DEBUG
SECRET_KEY = os.environ.get("SECRET_KEY", default=None)
if not SECRET_KEY:
raise ValueError("No secret key set for Flask application")
Notice that any value besides an empty string will be interpreted as a boolean
True
value in Python, which requires care if an environment explicitly sets
values intended to be False
.
Make sure to load the configuration very early on, so that extensions have the
ability to access the configuration when starting up. There are other methods
on the config object as well to load from individual files. For a complete
reference, read the Config
class documentation.
Configuration Best Practices
The downside with the approach mentioned earlier is that it makes testing a little harder. There is no single 100% solution for this problem in general, but there are a couple of things you can keep in mind to improve that experience:
- Create your application in a function and register blueprints on it. That way you can create multiple instances of your application with different configurations attached which makes unittesting a lot easier. You can use this to pass in configuration as needed.
- Do not write code that needs the configuration at import time. If you limit yourself to request-only accesses to the configuration you can reconfigure the object later on as needed.
Development / Production
Most applications need more than one configuration. There should be at least separate configurations for the production server and the one used during development. The easiest way to handle this is to use a default configuration that is always loaded and part of the version control, and a separate configuration that overrides the values as necessary as mentioned in the example above:
app = Flask(__name__)
app.config.from_object('yourapplication.default_settings')
app.config.from_envvar('YOURAPPLICATION_SETTINGS')
Then you just have to add a separate config.py
file and export
YOURAPPLICATION_SETTINGS=/path/to/config.py
and you are done. However
there are alternative ways as well. For example you could use imports or
subclassing.
What is very popular in the Django world is to make the import explicit in
the config file by adding from yourapplication.default_settings
import *
to the top of the file and then overriding the changes by hand.
You could also inspect an environment variable like
YOURAPPLICATION_MODE
and set that to [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference], [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] etc
and import different hardcoded files based on that.
An interesting pattern is also to use classes and inheritance for configuration:
class Config(object):
DEBUG = False
TESTING = False
DATABASE_URI = 'sqlite:///:memory:'
class ProductionConfig(Config):
DATABASE_URI = 'mysql://user@localhost/foo'
class DevelopmentConfig(Config):
DEBUG = True
class TestingConfig(Config):
TESTING = True
To enable such a config you just have to call into
from_object()
:
app.config.from_object('configmodule.ProductionConfig')
There are many different ways and it’s up to you how you want to manage your configuration files. However here a list of good recommendations:
- Keep a default configuration in version control. Either populate the config with this default configuration or import it in your own configuration files before overriding values.
- Use an environment variable to switch between the configurations. This can be done from outside the Python interpreter and makes development and deployment much easier because you can quickly and easily switch between different configs without having to touch the code at all. If you are working often on different projects you can even create your own script for sourcing that activates a virtualenv and exports the development configuration for you.
- Use a tool like fabric in production to push code and configurations separately to the production server(s). For some details about how to do that, head over to the Deploying with Fabric pattern.
Instance Folders
New in version 0.8.
Flask 0.8 introduces instance folders. Flask for a long time made it
possible to refer to paths relative to the application’s folder directly
(via Flask.root_path
). This was also how many developers loaded
configurations stored next to the application. Unfortunately however this
only works well if applications are not packages in which case the root
path refers to the contents of the package.
With Flask 0.8 a new attribute was introduced:
Flask.instance_path
. It refers to a new concept called the
“instance folder”. The instance folder is designed to not be under
version control and be deployment specific. It’s the perfect place to
drop things that either change at runtime or configuration files.
You can either explicitly provide the path of the instance folder when creating the Flask application or you can let Flask autodetect the instance folder. For explicit configuration use the [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] parameter:
app = Flask(__name__, instance_path='/path/to/instance/folder')
Please keep in mind that this path must be absolute when provided.
If the [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] parameter is not provided the following default locations are used:
Uninstalled module:
/myapp.py /instance
Uninstalled package:
/myapp /__init__.py /instance
Installed module or package:
$PREFIX/lib/python2.X/site-packages/myapp $PREFIX/var/myapp-instance
$PREFIX
is the prefix of your Python installation. This can be/usr
or the path to your virtualenv. You can print the value ofsys.prefix
to see what the prefix is set to.
Since the config object provided loading of configuration files from relative filenames we made it possible to change the loading via filenames to be relative to the instance path if wanted. The behavior of relative paths in config files can be flipped between “relative to the application root” (the default) to “relative to instance folder” via the [UNKNOWN NODE title_reference] switch to the application constructor:
app = Flask(__name__, instance_relative_config=True)
Here is a full example of how to configure Flask to preload the config from a module and then override the config from a file in the config folder if it exists:
app = Flask(__name__, instance_relative_config=True)
app.config.from_object('yourapplication.default_settings')
app.config.from_pyfile('application.cfg', silent=True)
The path to the instance folder can be found via the
Flask.instance_path
. Flask also provides a shortcut to open a
file from the instance folder with Flask.open_instance_resource()
.
Example usage for both:
filename = os.path.join(app.instance_path, 'application.cfg')
with open(filename) as f:
config = f.read()
# or via open_instance_resource:
with app.open_instance_resource('application.cfg') as f:
config = f.read()