The other day a friend of mine was trying out flask-peewee and he had some questions about the best way to structure his app to avoid triggering circular imports. For someone new to flask, this can be a bit of a puzzler, especially if you're coming from django which automatically imports your modules. In this post I'll walk through how I like to structure my flask apps to avoid circular imports. In my examples I'll be showing how to use "flask-peewee", but the same technique should be applicable for other flask plugins.
I'll walk through the modules I commonly use in my apps, then show how to tie them all together and provide a single entrypoint into your app.
Today I merged in the "unstable/2.0" branch of peewee. I'm very excited about the changes and I hope you will be, too.
I have written a documentation page on upgrading which gives the rationale behind the rewrite and some examples of the new querying API. Please feel free to take a look but much of the information presented in this post is lifted directly from the docs.
The biggest changes between 1.0 and 2.0 are in the syntax used for constructing queries. The first iteration of peewee I threw up on github was about 600 lines. I was passing around strings and dictionaries and as time went on and I added features, those strings turned into tuples and objects. This meant, though, that I needed code to handle all the possible ways of expressing something. Look at the code for parse_select.
I learned a valuable lesson: keep data in datastructures until the absolute last second.
With the benefit of hindsight and experience, I decided to rewrite and unify the API a bit. The result is a tradeoff. The newer syntax may be a bit more verbose at times, but at least it will be consistent.
I've developed an interest in some of the more advanced features of SQLite 3.7 after reading the O'Reilly title Using SQLite (Small. Fast. Reliable. Choose Any Three). For personal projects I like using SQLite for prototyping or for simple applications, and when I need something more powerful I turn to Postgresql. Because peewee supports both of these databases (as well as MySQL), it is limited to a lowest-common-denominator feature set. While this encompasses a broad range of features, each database engine has its own extensions and I've been interested in adding some pythonic support for the cooler extensions.
Currently, I've got support for:
This post will show the usage of the hstore and full-text search extensions. I will also show how I went about writing these extension modules so if you're interested in writing your own you will have a good foundation.
All of these extensions live in the playhouse package, included with the current
master branch of peewee.
To follow along at home, feel free to install peewee:
pip install -e git+https://github.com/coleifer/peewee.git#egg=peewee
For fun I put together a small script that is capable of introspecting databases and generating peewee models. I borrowed the crucial bits from django's codebase, which has methods for introspecting column types and foreign key constraints.
The code is hopefully rather straightforward - it simply grabs the list of tables, column type information which is then mapped to peewee field types, then finally resolves foreign keys. The generated models are then dumped to standard out, along with a database declaration.
Recently I stumbled across the twitter bootstrap project, which is a set of cross-browser compliant stylesheets and scripts. I liked them so much that I've ported the admin templates to use bootstrap. Here's a little screenshot of the design refresh taken from the example app:
http://media.charlesleifer.com/images/photos/flask-peewee-admin.jpg
I hope this will make the admin easier to work with in the long-run!
I'd like to write a post about a project I've been working on for the past month or so. I've had a great time working on it and am excited to start putting it to use. The project is called flask-peewee -- it is a set of utilities that bridges the python microframework flask and the lightweight ORM peewee. It is packaged as a flask extension and comes with the following batteries included:
Over the past month I've been working on adding support for both MySQL and PostgreSQL to peewee. I'm happy to say that after a couple weekend hack sessions all tests are now passing.
I'm pleased to announce that I've added support for MySQL to peewee. All tests are now passing. In the process I uncovered a few small bugs which have also been fixed.
I also added some new reference documentation which describes succinctly how to do basic configuration and querying with peewee.
For the past month or so I've been working on writing my own ORM in Python. The project grew out of a need for a lightweight persistence layer for use in Flask web apps. As I've grown so familiar with the Django ORM over the past year, many of the ideas in Peewee are analagous to the concepts in Django. My goal from the beginning has been to keep the implementation simple without sacrificing functionality, and to ultimately create something hackable that others might be able to read and contribute to.
