running flask db from within custom package

[amouhsine]

Hi @nickjj ,

First of all, I would like to congratulate you on flask-db. ( I am also keen to invest in your snakeeyes app!)
I am writing a flask app and I don't want to let the user write the export FLASKAPP= and then flask db to avoid messing with the environment variables.
What is the best way to access the db cli via a console script defined in the setup.py ?
Basically, I want something like manage db --help where manage points to manage.py. In this file, I will handle all the environments variables.

Thanks in advance for your help.

A

[nickjj]

Hi,

Setting FLASK_APP is a requirement of the flask CLI command not this extension.

If you don't set that variable then even running flask --help will throw an error of flask.cli.NoAppException: Could not locate a Flask application. You did not provide the "FLASK_APP" environment variable, and a "wsgi.py" or "app.py" module was not found in the current directory..

You can choose to use a .env file and have that loaded in with python-dotenv (or Docker instead if your app is using it). If you're using systemd you can load in an env file too. This way the user never has to export anything directly. The same goes for any cloud environment like Heroku too.