Hey, Dew plucky again! This is my second Flask tutorial. If you haven't read my first tutorial you can click this link to read it: dewplucky.hashnode.dev/learn-flask-with-me
In the first tutorial; we learned how to create a Flask application, and how to display a string on your web page. Now we're going to learn about routes and, displaying HTML tags and HTML files.
Routing
First, I will try to explain what is a route with some examples. Let's go to hashnode.com, and click on Explore to go to the explore page. As you can see, when you go to the explore page, the URL at the search bar of your browser changes to hashnode.com/explore. So the "/explore" here, is a route that executes the view function for the explore page.
Remember how we created a route and a view function in the previous article.
@app.route('/')
def index():
return "Dew Plucky"
With @app.route("/") we identify a route that executes the view function index() which returns the string "Dew Plucky".
Now let's create a new route
@app.route("/hey!")
def hey():
return "Hey, user!"
Run the code and open up the localhost on your browser, then go to the route /hey! you will see the string "Hey, user!"
HTML
Displaying HTML tags
It's very easy to display HTML tags in Flask. All we need to do is return the HTML tag we want to display, as a string.
@app.route("/hey!")
def hey():
return "<h1>Hey, user!</h1>"
We displayed <h1> tags in this example. We can display some other tags, for example, we can display the paragraph tags <p>
@app.route("/hey!")
def hey():
return "<p>This is a paragraph</p>"
Rendering HTML Files
To store our HTML files we need to create a new folder called templates in the application folder, then we can create our HTML file in the templates folder.
I named my file index.html, and added some tags.
Now we can display our HTML files. Let's go back to the app.py file
First, we need to import the render_template method.
from flask import Flask, render_template
Next, we will return the index.html file with our view function by using the method render_template().
@app.route("/hey!")
def hey():
return render_template("index.html")
Let's run the code and see how our page looks like
In the end my app.py file looks like this
from flask import Flask , render_template
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/')
def index():
return "Dew Plucky"
@app.route("/hey!")
def hey():
return render_template("index.html")
if __name__=='__main__':
app.run(debug=True)