Flask Course Released! – Patrick's Software Blog

I’m so excited to announce the release of my second course at TestDriven.io:

Developing Web Applications with Python and Flask

This course teaches the fundamentals of Flask and then shows how to build a stock portfolio app that gets deployed to Heroku. Here is an example of the deployed application:

https://flask-stock-portfolio-app.herokuapp.com/

Course Details

This course contains six parts:

Part 1 – Flask Fundamentals

The first section of this course focuses on those core pieces:

• View functions
• Jinja templates
• Forms
• Sessions
• Static files
• Flash messages
• Logging

Additionally, you’ll learn how to write tests for a Flask application using pytest.

Part 2 – Structure

The second section of this course focuses on structuring a Flask application using blueprints.

In this section, you’ll learn how to create different configurations for different environments — e.g., development, testing, and production. We’ll dive into how the Application Factory design pattern can be applied to Flask to easily create a Flask application as well.

This section also provides a deep-dive into how Flask processes requests and how the application and request contexts are handled during a request.

Finally, you’ll learn how fixtures in pytest can help create the initial state for running tests.

Part 3 – Database

The third section of this course focuses on using Flask-SQLAlchemy to:

• create models for the tables in the database
• store and retrieve data in the database

In addition, we’ll look at how to create custom CLI commands in Flask to populate the database with data.

Part 4 – User Management

Starting with the fourth section of this course, we’ll utilize Test-Driven Development (TDD) to incrementally add functionality to the Flask app.

This section focuses on managing the users of the app:

• Registering new users
• Logging users in and out
• Sending emails with Flask-Mail
• Confirming users’ email addresses using unique links emailed to them
• Implementing ‘forgot your password’ functionality
• Presenting a user profile page

In addition, you’ll learn about how to mitigate CSRF and XSS attacks.

Part 5 – Stocks

The fifth section of this course focuses on working with stock data.

We’ll look at how to display the stock portfolio for each user and how to add new stocks.

You’ll learn about monkeypatching for testing an external API. Then, we’ll dive into pulling in stock data from an external API.

This section culminates with creating charts of the historical stock prices using Chart.js.

Part 6 – Deploy

The sixth section of this course focuses on deploying the app to Heroku and configuring SendGrid for sending emails.

Conclusion

The first seven chapters of the course are available as a free preview on testdriven.io and the course is now available for purchase!