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Python: How to install Flask

In this article, we will show you how to install Flask.

Let’s start by making a folder we can download the stuff we need to.

mkdir ~/tmpdownload

Let’s move into that folder…

cd ~/tmpdownload

Let’s download the files and unzip them…

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/F/Flask/Flask-0.9.tar.gz

tar xzf Flask-*.tar.gz && rm Flask-*.tar.gz

Now lets move into the folder that we unzipped…

cd F*

It’s time to do the install itself…

python2.6 setup.py install --user

Now lets move into our public_html folder so we can start adding the needed files…

cd ~/public_html

Lets create the htaccess file we are going to need…

nano .htaccess

Once Nano is open, paste the following…
AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.fcgi/$1 [QSA,L]

To save it, simply press Ctrl + X, Y then Enter.

Now lets make the fcgi file we need…

nano index.fcgi

Paste the following…

#!/usr/bin/env python2.6
from flask import Flask
from flup.server.fcgi import WSGIServer
app = Flask(__name__)
 
@app.route('/')
def hello():
	return "Hello world!"
 
WSGIServer(app).run()

To save it, simply press Ctrl + X, Y then Enter.

Time to make it executable…

chmod +x index.fcgi

Now lets clean up that download folder we made at the start…

rm -r ~/tmpdownload

That’s it!

Please Note: In some situations, you may not notice changes made to your code/website. This can be resolved by killing/stopping the index.fcgi process over SSH. For more information on how to do this, please click here.