Code Chronicles

Getting instant feedback for code changes is essential when developing a web application. Typical workflows for Python web applications involve a hot-reload functionality for the development web server that will automatically restart the server when changes to python files are detected. However, the server will not automatically restart when changes to HTML, CSS, or JavaScript files are detected. When those files are updated, you must manually restart the server for the changes to occur. Moreover, this typical workflow will not automatically refresh your web browser when you update files, so you must manually refresh the web page to see the changes.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to automatically hot-reload your FastAPI and Flask projects that use template engines like Jinja with web servers like uvicorn or gunicorn. After reading, you will be able to automatically restart your server and refresh your browser when Python, HTML, CSS, and other files change—no manual intervention required.

Web scraping is the concept of programmatically collecting data from a website. This article will discuss using Playwright for python web scraping. The most popular web-scraping packages for python are requests and Beautiful Soup used together. This combination is potent and straightforward to use for most web pages. However, the use case has limitations because the combination relies on making server requests and reading the static HTML returned. It can be challenging to scrape single-page applications (SPAs) or websites where the objects to scrape are only available after some javascript interactions. Playwright circumvents these limitations by interacting with web pages like humans to find the data that needs scraping.

Cookies! 🍪🍪 Tasty snack or valuable web development tool? 🤷‍♂️ For our context today, cookies are small pieces of data sent from the server to the client. The client’s browser stores cookies locally and then sends the cookies back to the server with every request. Cookies are used for a variety of purposes, including session management (who’s logged in?), keeping track of user settings (use dark mode?), and tracking user behavior (website analytics, ad targeting). In this tutorial, we’ll talk about how to manage cookies with the Flask web framework. We’ll go over setting, updating, retrieving, and deleting cookies in Flask routes.

Many users like the simplicity of clicking one button to register and/or log into a website using one of their existing logged-in accounts on another website such as Facebook or Google. This is OAuth user authentication. But sometimes users don’t have those other accounts so it’s good to provide them with a full-proof means of logging in to a site. That’s username/password authentication. Well for your site why don’t you give users both options?

In this article, I’ll talk about how you can log in and register users for your flask application with flexibility by allowing either OAuth2 or username/password authentication. We’ll be using Flask for our web framework, MongoDB for our database, and authomatic for our OAuth authentication framework. But if those don’t apply to you, don’t fret! Many of the concepts discussed here can be applied to your web stack too!