What's the right approach for calling functions after a flask app is run?
Probably you were looking for Flask.before_first_request
decorator, as in:
@app.before_first_requestdef _run_on_start(a_string): print "doing something important with %s" % a_string
The duplicate output from your function can be explained by the reloader. The first thing it does is start the main function in a new thread so it can monitor the source files and restart the thread when they change. Disable this with the use_reloader=False
option.
If you want to be able to run your function when starting the server from a different module, wrap it in a function, and call that function from the other module:
def run_server(dom): _run_on_start("%s" % dom) app.run(debug=True, use_reloader=False)if __name__ == '__main__': if len(sys.argv) < 2: raise Exception("Must provide domain for application execution.") else: DOM = sys.argv[1] run_server(DOM)
The "right approach" depends on what you're actually trying to accomplish here. The built-in server is meant for running your application in a local testing environment before deploying it to a production server, so the problem of starting it from a different module doesn't make much sense on its own.
from flask import Flaskdef create_app(): app = Flask(__name__) def run_on_start(*args, **argv): print "function before start" run_on_start() return appapp = create_app()@app.route("/")def hello(): return "Hello World!"