Installation

Installation is straightforward, using the normal python package install. I do advise you to additionally install the base skeleton application so that you can immediately have a running application (without any models yet) and an easy to grow boilerplate.

Checkout installation video on YouTube

Using pip

  • Simple Install

    You can install the framework simply by:

    $ pip install flask-appbuilder
    
  • Advised Virtual Environment Install

    Virtual env is highly advisable because the more projects you have, the more likely it is that you will be working with different versions of Python itself, or at least different versions of Python libraries. Let’s face it: quite often libraries break backwards compatibility, and it’s unlikely that any serious application will have zero dependencies. So what do you do if two or more of your projects have conflicting dependencies?

    If you are on Mac OS X or Linux, chances are that one of the following two commands will work for you:

    $ sudo easy_install virtualenv
    

    or even better:

    $ sudo pip install virtualenv
    

    One of these will probably install virtualenv on your system. Maybe it’s even in your package manager. If you use a debian system (like Ubuntu), try:

    $ sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv
    

    Next create a virtualenv:

    $ virtualenv venv
    New python executable in venv/bin/python
    Installing distribute............done.
    $ . venv/bin/activate
    (venv)$
    

    Now install F.A.B on the virtual env, it will install all the dependencies and these will be isolated from your system’s python packages

    (venv)$ pip install flask-appbuilder
    

    Once you have virtualenv installed, use Flask the command line tool to create your first app. So create a skeleton application and the first admin user:

    (venv)$ flask fab create-app
    Your new app name: first_app
    Your engine type, SQLAlchemy or MongoEngine [SQLAlchemy]:
    Downloaded the skeleton app, good coding!
    (venv)$ cd first_app
    (venv)$ export FLASK_APP=app
    (venv)$ flask fab create-admin
    Username [admin]:
    User first name [admin]:
    User last name [user]:
    Email [admin@fab.org]:
    Password:
    Repeat for confirmation:
    

    Note

    There are two type of skeletons available you can choose from SQLAlchemy default or MongoEngine for MongoDB. To use the MongoEngine skeleton you need to install flask-mongoengine extension.

    The framework will immediately insert all possible permissions on the database, these will be associated with the Admin role that belongs to the admin user you just created. Your ready to run:

    (venv)$ flask run
    

    This will start a web development server

    You now have a running development server on http://localhost:8080.

    The skeleton application is not actually needed for you to run AppBuilder, but it’s a good way to start. This first application is SQLAlchemy based.

Initialization

When starting your application for the first time, all AppBuilder security tables will be created for you. All your models can easily be created too (optionally).

Note

Since version 1.3.0 no admin user is automatically created, you must use flask fab cli to do it. There are lot’s of other useful options you can use with flask fab like reset user’s password, list all your users and views, etc.

Installation Requirements

pip installs all the requirements for you.

Flask App Builder depends on

  • flask : The web framework, this is what we’re extending.

  • flask-sqlalchemy : DB access (see SQLAlchemy).

  • flask-login : Login, session on flask.

  • flask-openid : Open ID authentication.

  • flask-wtform : Web forms.

  • flask-Babel : For internationalization.

If you plan to use Image processing or upload, you will need to install Pillow:

pip install Pillow

Python 2 and 3 Compatibility

The framework removed support for python 2 since version 1.13.X

For version 2.1.1, the minimum supported Python version is 3.6.