How do I connect server databases with Flask?

Question

So I have been making websites using PHP with a MySQL database, PHPMyAdmin, and XAMPP. I am trying to switch from PHP to python. All of the tutorials seem to be using SQLite instead of MYSQL. As far as I understand, sqlite is serverless and cant hold certain data types like datetime, but I need datetime in my website. How would I connect to MySQL with a python Flask project or is there a different way I need to do this?

Hi, first at all welcome to SO! Sqlite is not a good solution if you need read/write from multiple clients. You can use any ORM to maintain your database queries. Sqlalchemy is the most populer ORM for Python. Also you can use flask edition version of ORMs. They are providing more feature based for web. — Buğra İşgüzar, Jun 11 '20 at 23:13

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 12 '20 at 04:18

You need to use Client Library like PyMySQL

To install pymysql use:

pip install PyMySQL

And then use this function, it will return the DB object:

def make_connection():
            try:
               db = pymysql.connect(host='localhost',
                             user='root',
                             password='',
                             db='DatabaseName',
                             charset='utf8mb4',
                             cursorclass=pymysql.cursors.DictCursor)
            except Exception as error:
                print(error)
            return db

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 12 '20 at 07:34

As what @tirth-mehta mentioned, if you want to use connect without any ORM, you should a client library. and if you feel it's too painful to not forget to close connection in every function call, you could use a decorator like this:

DB_CONFIG = {'host':'127.0.0.1',
             'database':'dbname',
             'user':'root',
             'password':''}

def connect(func):
    def _connect(*args, **kwargs):
        conn = pymysql.connect(**DB_CONFIG)

        try:
            rv = func(conn, *args, **kwargs)
        except Exception as e:
            print(e)
        else:
            conn.commit()
        finally:
            conn.close()
        return rv
    return _connect

How do I connect server databases with Flask?

2 Answers2