10.3. Routing¶

Modern web applications use meaningful URLs to help users. Users are more likely to like a page and come back if the page uses a meaningful URL they can remember and use to directly visit a page.

Use the route() decorator to bind a function to a URL.

@app.route('/')
def index():
    return 'Index Page'

@app.route('/hello')
def hello():
    return 'Hello, World'

You can do more! You can make parts of the URL dynamic and attach multiple rules to a function.

10.3.1. Variable Rules¶

You can add variable sections to a URL by marking sections with <variable_name>. Your function then receives the <variable_name> as a keyword argument. Optionally, you can use a converter to specify the type of the argument like <converter:variable_name>.

@app.route('/user/<username>')
def show_user_profile(username):
    # show the user profile for that user
    return f'User {username}'

@app.route('/post/<int:post_id>')
def show_post(post_id):
    # show the post with the given id, the id is an integer
    return f'Post {post_id}'

@app.route('/path/<path:subpath>')
def show_subpath(subpath):
    # show the subpath after /path/
    return f'Subpath {subpath}'

Converter types:

`string`	(default) accepts any text without a slash
`int`	accepts positive integers
`float`	accepts positive floating point values
`path`	like `string` but also accepts slashes
`uuid`	accepts UUID strings

10.3.2. Unique URLs / Redirection Behavior¶

The following two rules differ in their use of a trailing slash.

@app.route('/projects/')
def projects():
    return 'The project page'

@app.route('/about')
def about():
    return 'The about page'

The canonical URL for the projects endpoint has a trailing slash. It’s similar to a folder in a file system. If you access the URL without a trailing slash, Flask redirects you to the canonical URL with the trailing slash.

The canonical URL for the about endpoint does not have a trailing slash. It’s similar to the pathname of a file. Accessing the URL with a trailing slash produces a 404 “Not Found” error. This helps keep URLs unique for these resources, which helps search engines avoid indexing the same page twice.

10.3.3. URL Building¶

To build a URL to a specific function, use the url_for() function. It accepts the name of the function as its first argument and any number of keyword arguments, each corresponding to a variable part of the URL rule. Unknown variable parts are appended to the URL as query parameters.

Why would you want to build URLs using the URL reversing function url_for() instead of hard-coding them into your templates?

Reversing is often more descriptive than hard-coding the URLs.
You can change your URLs in one go instead of needing to remember to manually change hard-coded URLs.
URL building handles escaping of special characters and Unicode data transparently.
The generated paths are always absolute, avoiding unexpected behavior of relative paths in browsers.
If your application is placed outside the URL root, for example, in /myapplication instead of /, url_for() properly handles that for you.

For example, here we use the test_request_context() method to try out url_for(). test_request_context() tells Flask to behave as though it’s handling a request even while we use a Python shell. See Context Locals.

from flask import url_for

@app.route('/')
def index():
    return 'index'

@app.route('/login')
def login():
    return 'login'

@app.route('/user/<username>')
def profile(username):
    return f'{username}\'s profile'

with app.test_request_context():
    print(url_for('index'))
    print(url_for('login'))
    print(url_for('login', next='/'))
    print(url_for('profile', username='John Doe'))

/
/login
/login?next=/
/user/John%20Doe

10.3.4. HTTP Methods¶

Web applications use different HTTP methods when accessing URLs. You should familiarize yourself with the HTTP methods as you work with Flask. By default, a route only answers to GET requests. You can use the methods argument of the route() decorator to handle different HTTP methods.

from flask import request

@app.route('/login', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def login():
    if request.method == 'POST':
        return do_the_login()
    else:
        return show_the_login_form()

If GET is present, Flask automatically adds support for the HEAD method and handles HEAD requests according to the HTTP RFC. Likewise, OPTIONS is automatically implemented for you.

10.4. Static Files¶

Dynamic web applications also need static files. That’s usually where the CSS and JavaScript files are coming from. Ideally your web server is configured to serve them for you, but during development Flask can do that as well. Just create a folder called static in your package or next to your module and it will be available at /static on the application.

To generate URLs for static files, use the special 'static' endpoint name:

url_for('static', filename='style.css')

The file has to be stored on the filesystem as static/style.css.

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