Combining Flask and Django

In building Churp I had a need for creating a lightweight service to handle my call routing and communicating with Twilio. I had build most of the site using Django, and I could have made it a separate django app, but I wanted to decouple the presentation of the site and the routing of the calls. Flask to the rescue.

I've used Flask just a few times: once for an internal api, and now as a handler for requests coming from Twilio. One thing that is a problem, however, is writing unit tests that share a MySQL database with a separate Django application. After a lot of trial and error I managed to come up with a solution to using Django tests for your flask application. Flask has its own way of testing, but it was missing too many things for me to be able to use it i.e. completely geared towards using sqlite. In the end the advantages over writing an actual Django app are small, but Flask being smaller and easier to manage than Django, I'm happy with the result. Here is basic solution to upgrading your unit tests with Flask:



from django.core.management import setup_environ
from django.test import TestCase
from your_project import settings
setup_environ(settings)

#NOTE: you may need to add to sys.path to make sure your django project is on your path

class FlaskAppTest(TestCase):

    fixtures = ['your_fixtures.json',]


    def setUp(self):
        self.app = file_with_flask_app.app.test_client()


    def test_as_usual(self);
        response = self.app.post('/your_flask_url/', data={'your': 'post_parameters',}, 
                                              headers={'header1': 'header1_value'})
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 200)
        ....