[python] Flask at first run: Do not use the development server in a production environment

The official tutorial discusses deploying an app to production. One option is to use Waitress, a production WSGI server. Other servers include Gunicorn and uWSGI.

When running publicly rather than in development, you should not use the built-in development server (flask run). The development server is provided by Werkzeug for convenience, but is not designed to be particularly efficient, stable, or secure.

Instead, use a production WSGI server. For example, to use Waitress, first install it in the virtual environment:

$ pip install waitress

You need to tell Waitress about your application, but it doesn’t use FLASK_APP like flask run does. You need to tell it to import and call the application factory to get an application object.

$ waitress-serve --call 'flaskr:create_app'
Serving on http://0.0.0.0:8080

Or you can use waitress.serve() in the code instead of using the CLI command.

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def index():
    return "<h1>Hello!</h1>"

if __name__ == "__main__":
    from waitress import serve
    serve(app, host="0.0.0.0", port=8080)
$ python hello.py