Root: (noun) The part of a plant that attaches it to the ground or to a support, conveying water and nourishment to the rest of the plant.

A collection of shell scripts and the core of a Flask application to support the common elements of many web apps.

Specifically, this is designed for my own sites, and may be of little use to outsiders.

In no particular order:

• a virtualenv with Ruby, Node, and Bower package freezing;
• a Flask app with extensions including:
  • Flask-Mako
  • Flask-SQLALchemy
  • Flask-WTForms
  • Flask-WTCrud (in development)
  • Flask-Images (currently Flask-ImgSizer)
  • Flask-Login
  • Flask-ACL
• basic logging
• basic error handling
• extensible configuration mechanism;
• HAML templates (triggered via a .haml extension);
• slightly more secure sessions;
• a re route converter;
• several Markdown extensions;
• CSS processing via SASS;
• Javascript concatenation and minification via Sprockets;
• basic schema migrations partialy by SQLAlchemy-Migrate.

For now, Roots assumes that you want to operate the web app out of the directory that it is in. It will set the app.instance_path to os.path.join(app.root_path, 'var').

All of the run-time information should be stored in app.instance_path, so you can destroy that to start with a clean slate.

You must inform Roots of where to find the Flask app to serve. Create a roots.py module, and import your Flask app as app within it.

The Flask config is build by executing a series of config files.

Roots will look for Python files in {app.root_path}/etc/flask, {app.instance_path}/etc/flask, and <Flask-Roots>/etc/flask. It will execute them ordered by their name. I tend to prefix these files with a three-digit sequence number to achieve a good order.

These files will be executed in the same namespace, which will always have ROOT_PATH, INSTANCE_PATH, and setdefault (which operates on the execution namespace).

Once bootstrapped and configured, you can ask Roots to build your app:

from flask.ext.roots import make_app

app = make_app(__name__)

# Extract: db, mako, auth, login_manager, etc..
globals().update(app.roots.extensions)