Organize A Flask Project To Handle Production And Development Environments Effectively

Separated configurations for Development and Production

In most situations, applications would need different configurations for each environment: Production, Staging, Development, etc.

Load default config and an environment specific one

The easiest way to have multiple configurations is to:

• use a default configuration that is always loaded and
• the default configuration is under version control (e.g.: part of the git project repo) and
• Use an environment variable to switch between the configurations that overrides the values as needed in each environment

Example:

Having a configuration that loads configuration values from the specified config environment YOURAPPLICATION_SETTINGS:

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config.from_object('yourapplication.default_settings')
app.config.from_envvar('YOURAPPLICATION_SETTINGS')

Then we create a separate config.py for each env and export the configuration path:

$ export
YOURAPPLICATION_SETTINGS=/path/to/config.py

This way it will always load the default configs and then our custom variables from YOURAPPLICATION_SETTINGS.

Instance paths

From Flask 0.8, there is the concept of instance folders. The instance folder is a good fit for configuration files because it is designed to not be under version control and be deployment specific.

By default, Flask looks for a folder named instance in the same level of your main file or the package.

Behaviour

Using this folder and having environment specific configuration files in the config folder we end up having the following directory structure:

...
config/
  __init__.py
  default.py
  development.py
  production.py
instance/
  config.py
myapp/
  __init__.py
  myapp.py
  ..

To have the configurations loaded we have to:

• load the default config in config/default.py
• load configuration from instance folder instance/config.py
• Load the file specified by the APP_CONFIG_FILE environment variable

In myapp/__init__.py we load them:

# myapp/__init__.py

app = Flask(__name__, instance_relative_config=True)
app.config.from_object('config.default')
app.config.from_pyfile('config.py')
app.config.from_envvar('APP_CONFIG_FILE')

Then set the environment variable depending on the server we are invoking the app:

$ export APP_CONFIG_FILE=/var/www/yourapp/config/production.py

Final

Now your folder structure should look like:

myapp
├── config
│   ├── __init__.py     # empty
│   ├── development.py
│   ├── default.py
│   └── production.py
├── instance
│   └── config.py
└── myapp
   ├── __init__.py
   └── myapp.py

It can be useful to also add support for dotenv to handle sensitive variables when deploying to Heroku.

References

• Explore flask book http://explore-flask.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration.html
• Non existing path when setting up Flask to have separated configurations for each environment