How to turn your Raspberry Pi into a Flask App Server 

You can run it with nohup which will run it in the background OR (preferred) You can run it behind Apache and let Apache maintain it. Tutorial here: www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/pi_flask_apache.php If you need to take a step back and learn how to install apache: www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/pi_apache_web_server.php I have a bunch more projects on the site and most of them use Flask running in the background, maintained by Apache. Feel free to check them out.

Yup! You can host as many websites as you can until your Pi starts running out of Memory/space. Python is super fun, hope you're having fun learning. Heroku skills is also really good to have. Good luck with your project!

Sure, ask away! I'll try my best to help.

@@naztronaut The first one that comes to mind is that once you creates a virtual environment, could I take that folder and more it across to another Rpi?

@@phillip4833 Hey there, sorry I missed your question last week. venv in Python is wonky when you move it from one directory to another, let alone one Pi to another. It's best to just set it up again, should only take a couple of minutes. The reason behind this is when a venv is created, the paths are often hard coded somewhere in the environment. So when you move it, the path doesn't change. It's a little annoying but not much you can do at this point, unless they make huge changes. This is also why you should never push your venv into GitHub or any other versioning system, because it won't work for anyone who clones/pulls the repository. Hope that makes sense!

@@naztronaut yes that make sense and I believe i ran into this problem lol

Hi Eugene, Glad this was helpful! To access the Flask app on another computer, just put in the Pi's IP address into your browser. So if you ssh into your pi as 192.168.1.123, then go to 192.168.1.123:5000 and you should be able to access the site. If you don't want to access it using the port (:5000) then you can run it behind Apache or another web server. I have a guide on how to do that as well here: www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/pi_flask_app_server.php You CAN make it accessible over the internet, but I wouldn't recommend it. To make it available, you'd need to set up port forwarding on your router and allow traffic to come through that port into your Pi. Unless you have your network locked down and take a whole lot of precautions, I would advise against making it available online, because hackers are always sniffing for these open ports and this could allow them easy access to your whole home network. If you need to access it externally, I recommend setting up a VPN. You can set up PiVPN that'll keep your connection secure. And I do have a tutorial on that as well: www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/pivpn_pihole.php Good luck!

i ran some command here and was successfully. i cant seem to have @app.route. how do i use this sign inside my nano file?

@@gcobanimkontwana4909 What does your code look like? have you copied/pasted from my example?

@@naztronaut i have but on flask run --host=0.0.0.0 already in use or 404 Error

@@gcobanimkontwana4909 Did you do "export FLASK_APP=hello.py" first? Check out the written steps here: www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/pi_flask_app_server.php

In cmd line, select something with your mouse to copy, and then right-click to paste. What does your hello.py look like?

That's good to know, thank you! It may be an environmental thing or just how things are initially set up. I only have 'deactivate' in there before changing owner status is because during test runs I've occasionally run into issues where the permissions weren't set correct because I was in venv.

Thank you

You can do 'source' or just a dot like I did in the video: . venv/bin/activate And if you're in an virtual environment, install flask as shown in 6:34 - pip install flask (or pip3 install flask) so that you don't have to keep running it with 'python -m'. Make sure you're in your virtual environment when you do it. The command not found error can happen if you install it in a venv but didn't activate it or you installed it globally and your venv can't access it. The written tutorial also has all these steps: www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/pi_flask_app_server.php

the easiest way to do it is, go into the bin folder and then type ". activate".

@@weibinyu It's the same as: . venv/bin/activate Minus the extra step of going into bin folder.