Flask-Coffee - Fill your flask with coffee

Flask-Coffee is a Flask extension that compiles .coffee CoffeeScript files into .js JavaScript files for you if they have changed before your app renders.

This is a nice idea in development and not so nice an idea in production, so please keep that in mind.

Prerequisites

You will need to have to have Node.js installed with NPM and coffee-script.

You can follow the instructions in my previous article to install Node.js and then it's just

npm -g install coffee-script

Installation

Install Flask-Coffee with pip:

pip install flask-coffee

Usage

from flaskext.coffee import coffee

coffee(app) 

This will watch your app’s static media directory and automatically render .coffee files into .js files in the same (sub)directory.

The best way to incorporate Flask-Coffee into your development is as described for flask-lesscss in my earlier flask-script tutorial.

Contribute

If you want to contribute email me at the email at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Flask-Coffee after checking out the code at http://bettercodes.org/projects/flask-coffee.

Installing Node.js on Ubuntu 11.04 and Mint 11

Installing Node.js is simple and let's you get play with all the Javascript goodness that it offers.

Another reason to install it is to use Flask-CSS (and hence lesscss) which I mentioned in my last article, so I thought I'd better cover that now.

Let's install it in our home directory:

cd ~
rm -fr node # in case this is a fresh install

sudo apt-get install -y g++ curl libssl-dev apache2-utils git-core
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/node-v0.4.9.tar.gz
tar xfz http://nodejs.org/dist/node-v0.4.9.tar.gz
cd node-v0.4.9 && ./configure 
# or the bleeding edge version
# git clone git://github.com/joyent/node.git 
# cd node && ./configure 
make 
sudo make install

and finally you need to add the following to your ~/.bashrc file:

export PATH="$HOME/node/bin:$PATH"

Finally install NPM (Node Package Manager):

source ~/.bashrc
curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh

Simples!

Thanks to:

• http://thinkdevcode.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/installing-node-js-on-ubuntu-11-04-natty-narwhal 

A Simple Flask-Script Example

Here is a simple flask-script example that you can use to start your application in development mode, or test modes.

I know that you can do that without flask-script, but the point of this script is that you can do so much more from this starting point. Notice for example that I'm trying to load flask-lesscss and execute it (which won't work, but won't fail if you don't have lesscss installed.)

To get the application (in the 'application' module) running you just need to do one of the following:

python manager.py dev
python manager.py test
python manager.py zen

I show how to add shell access in the second article in this series. Meanwhile why not let us see what you have in your manager script?

from flaskext.script import Manager, Server
from flaskext.zen import Test, ZenTest
import application


app = application.create_app()

manager = Manager(app)

class DevServer(Server):
    
    def handle(self, app, host, port, use_debugger, use_reloader):
        try:
            from flaskext.lesscss import lesscss
            lesscss(app)
        except: pass

        app.run(host=host,
            port=port,
            debug=use_debugger,
            use_debugger=use_debugger,
            use_reloader=use_reloader,
            **self.server_options)
            
            
if __name__ == "__main__":
    manager.add_command("dev", DevServer())
    manager.add_command('test', Test())
    manager.add_command('zen', ZenTest())
    manager.run()