[FIXED] How to automatically create database tables and schema with Flask and Sqalchemy?

Issue

I have a small Flask application. I add an extra security layer which is log in. I based my refactoring on the DO article.

In a nutshell,

__init__.py:

from flask import Flask
from flask_login import LoginManager
from flask_sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
from werkzeug.security import generate_password_hash
from sqlalchemy import create_engine

# init SQLAlchemy so we can use it later in our models
db = SQLAlchemy()

def create_app():
    app = Flask(__name__)

    app.config['SECRET_KEY'] = 'e56432f4402c9a0c166fe6c6a0a2fbbd'
    app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'sqlite:///db.sqlite'

    db.init_app(app)

        # blueprint for auth routes in our app
    from .auth import auth as auth_blueprint
    app.register_blueprint(auth_blueprint)

    # blueprint for non-auth parts of app
    from .main import main as main_blueprint
    app.register_blueprint(main_blueprint)

    login_manager = LoginManager()
    login_manager.login_view = 'auth.login'
    login_manager.init_app(app)

    from .models import User

    @login_manager.user_loader
    def load_user(user_id):
        # since the user_id is just the primary key of our user table, use it in the query for the user
        return User.query.get(int(user_id))

    return app

In order to create DB, I need to run in REPL:

  from project import db, create_app
  db.create_all(app=create_app())

This is both inconvenient and makes Docker image creation harder. I run an application as flask run. I saw similar issues but don't understand how to apply to my scenario.

How can I overcome this complication?

UPDATE 1:

My project structure is the following:

project/
  project/
    __init__.py
    auth.py
    main.py
    models.py
    static/
    templates/
  Dockerfile
  requirements.txt

Solution

I found a more elegant solution

Instead of return app make the following block, so an application will be created in the runtime if and only if the context was initialized and database created.

with app.app_context():
        db.create_all()
        return app

Surprisingly the Flask-SqlAlchemy is pointing out to REPL db creation as a first solution, not the one above.

UPDATE:

Here is an example of my Dockerfile:

FROM python:3.7-slim

ENV FLASK_APP=.

WORKDIR /app

COPY requirements.txt /app/requirements.txt

COPY . /app

RUN pip install -r requirements.txt

CMD flask run -h 0.0.0.0 -p 5000

The catch is that you have to change how you run flask, not via python command.

Answered By - Dmytro Chasovskyi