CS4300_Flask_template | Template for INFO/CS4300 project , using Flask

We assume by now all of you have seen and used virtualenv, but if not, go here to install and for dead-simple usage go here. (For Mac users, you may encounter an ERROR: Failed building wheel for greenlet. This can be fixed with xcode-select --install.). An aside note: In the above example, we created a virtualenv for a python3 environment. You will have python3.7.10 installed by default as we have used that version for assignments. This is what we will use for the application as well. NOTE: While you should be able to install these requirements in the virtualenv you used for the assignments, we advise using a fresh virtualenv so you can be sure that your virtualenv's installed packages and your repository's requirements.txt match exactly. This will be important when you add new dependencies.
If you followed the quickstart guide, you should now have set up postgres. Rather than writing raw-SQL for this application, I have chosen to utilize SQLAlchemy (specifically, Flask-SQLAlchemy) as a database Object-Relational-Model (ORM, for short). In addition, for the purposes of serialization (turning these database entities into organized JSONs that we can send over the wire) and deserialization (turning a JSON into a entity once again), I have chosen to use Marshmallow (specifically, marshmallow-SQLAlchemy). Several modules are needed to completely integrate Postgres into a Flask app, but several of these modules are co-dependent on one another. I have included all of these in the requirements.txt file, these modules include: flask-migrate marshmallow-sqlalchemy psycopg2.
Now that we have setup our database and have handled our manage.py script, we can create our config.py script, which involves the database and various other configuration information specific to Flask. This file will be used in our initialization of the Flask app in the app module in the near future.
DEBUG indicates whether or not debug stack traces will be logged by the server.
CSRF_ENABLED, CSRF_SESSION_KEY, and SECRET_KEY all relate to Cross-Site-Request-Forgery, which you can read more about here.
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI refers to the database URL (a server running your database). In the above example, I refer to an environment variable 'DATABASE_URL'. I will be discussing environment variables in the next section, so stay tuned.
Up until now, we haven't been able to run our server.
You can setup a database quickly by doing the following:. And everything else is self-explanatory. Upon creation it will give you an instance link that you will use for the DATABASE_URL.
Open up the Google Cloud Platform Console
Go to Storage > SQL
Create Instance
Create a PostgreSQL Instance