Route Discovery

Routes can live anywhere you want them too, as long as they are importable.

You can tell Flask-Via where to find routes in a couple of ways:

1. VIA_ROUTES_MODULE application configuration variable
2. routes_module argument passed into init_app in your application factory method.

You can use which ever you prefer.

Using Application Config

from flask import Flask
from flask.ext.via import Via

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['VIA_ROUTES_MODULE'] = 'yourapp.routes'

via = Via()
via.init_app(app)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True)

Using init_app setting routes_module

from flask import Flask
from flask.ext.via import Via

app = Flask(__name__)

via = Via()
via.init_app(app, routes_module='yourapp.routes')

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True)

Route Module

The routes module should define a list of routes, by default this list is called routes:

routes = [
    Functional('/', home),
    Functional('/about', about),
]

You can configure Flask-Via to look for any variable name of your choosing, this is done by passing an argument named routes_name into init_app, for example:

via = Via()
via.init_app(app, routes_name='urls')

You can also make this setting permanent by using the VIA_ROUTES_NAME configuration variable:

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['VIA_ROUTES_MODULE'] = 'yourapp.routes'
app.config['VIA_ROUTES_NAME'] = 'urls'

via = Via()
via.init_app(app)

Note

If you set VIA_ROUTES_NAME overriding this using routes_name is still possible however this does not propagate over any routes which are included.

Application Example

Assume we have the following application structure:

/path/to/foo
    - __init__.py
    - routes.py
    - views.py
    - app.py

Within views.py we have:

def home():
    return 'Hello world!'

def about():
    return 'The world is big'

Within routes.py we have:

from flask.ext.via.routers import default

urls = [
    default.Functional('/', home),
    default.Functional('/about', about),
]

Within app.py we have:

from flask import Flask
from flask.ext.via import Via

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['VIA_ROUTES_MODULE'] = 'foo.routes'

via = Via()
via.init_app(app, routes_name='urls')

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True)

You will see we used routes_name when calling via.init_app to tell Via what variable to look for within the routes module.