Flask makes it possible for developers to build an API for whatever use case they might have. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to set up Google Cloud, Cloud SQL, and App Engine to build a Flask API. (Cloud SQL is a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) database engine, and App Engine is a fully managed PaaS for hosting applications.)

A few Python frameworks can be used to create APIs, two of which are Flask and Django. Frameworks comes with functionality that makes it easy for developers to implement the features that users need to interact with their applications. The complexity of a web application could be a deciding factor when you’re choosing which framework to work with.

Django

Django is a robust framework that has a predefined structure with built-in functionality. The downside of its robustness, however, is that it could make the framework too complex for certain projects. It’s best suited to complex web applications that need to leverage the advanced functionality of Django.

Flask

Flask, on the other hand, is a lightweight framework for building APIs. Getting started with it is easy, and packages are available to make it robust as you go. This article will focus on defining the view functions and controller and on connecting to a database on Google Cloud and deploying to Google Cloud.

For the purpose of learning, we’ll build a Flask API with a few endpoints to manage a collection of our favorite songs. The endpoints will be for GET and POST requests: fetching and creating resources. Alongside that, we will be using the suite of services on the Google Cloud platform. We’ll set up Google’s Cloud SQL for our database and launch our app by deploying to App Engine. This tutorial is aimed at beginners who are taking their first stab at using Google Cloud for their app.

Setting Up A Flask Project

This tutorial assumes you have Python 3.x installed. If you don’t, head over to the official website to download and install it.

To check whether Python is installed, launch your command-line interface (CLI) and run the command below:

python -V

Our first step is to create the directory where our project will live. We will call it flask-app:

mkdir flask-app && cd flask-app

The first thing to do when starting a Python project is to create a virtual environment. Virtual environments isolate your working Python development. This means that this project can have its own dependencies, different from other project on your machines. venv is a module that ships with Python 3.

#flask #cloud #sql #api #developer