Getting Started with Flask Web Development : Beginner's Guide

What is Web Development ?

Web Development is the process of creating websites and softwares that support websites behind the scenes. A Web development process generally involves two parts to it :

• Front-End Development : Deals with creating user interfaces or UIs. Involves heavy use of HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
• Backend Development : Deals with creating software that supports websites behind the scenes. Involves any programming language like Python, Java, Rust etc.

Creating REST APIs, Server side rendered websites are all part of backend development. In this blog post we will be exploring how to get started with Backend development with Flask.

What is Flask ?

Flask is a web development framework written in Python. Flask is called a micro-framework because of it has built-in support for basics required for web development, and doesn't bloat you with loads of pre-defined libraries or utils.

Flask is known for it's simplicity, modularity and scalability. It gives the developers flexibility to extend it with third-party modules as needed. We highly recommend using Flask for medium-sized projects or services or if you need a framework where you get the control to decide what you want to install and what to avoid.

Install Flask on Windows/Mac/Linux

Let's install Flask on our system and start with our web development journey. Follow the steps :

1. Open your terminal and create a virtualenv :

   virtualenv -p python3 venv
   

   this will create a virtual environment to isolate all the dependencies for your flask application. Here we created a virtualenv with name venv that has python3 as it's default python version.

2. Activate the virtual environment :

   source venv/bin/activate
   

   this will activate the newly created virtual environment venv. Here on all the library installations etc will be done on venv.

3. Install flask with pip :

   pip install flask
   

   this will install flask from the pypi repository on your virtual environment using the pip package manager.

and, that's pretty much it. This will install Flask framework on your system, you are not set to start developing your own applications.