Convincing manager with large high traffic sites using Flask. Any tips?

[kramer65]

Seeing that I have (some) experience in Flask I really really want to use it for a new project we're about to start here in our company. I'm now looking for a couple websites that are either or all of the below:

• high traffic
• slick looking
• big/known names

I checked out the "powered by" part of the Flask website (http://flask.pocoo.org/community/poweredby/) but I can't find any big names on there. I think I once saw a little list of good sites using Flask, but I can't find them anymore.

Anybody any tips?

[untitaker]

I don't think you should bring in a tool into the team only you know. If the rest of your team is used to something else, try to use that. But then you didn't say anything about the thing you're building...

[kramer65]

Our team is building a lot of stuff. From Objective C on iPhone to Java on Android, to PHP in certain backend things, to Python for certain devops things. There is enough knowledge of many languages that that shouldn't be the problem. It's just the fact that our manager is quite focused on PHP, because "everybody is using it". I'll be mainly building this part (an internal website) on my own, with maybe others joining in later. Seeing that I have experience in it, it makes sense for me to build it in Python (and Flask). I know that others will take over in a later stage, but that shouldn't withhold us to choose a technology in which prototyping is blazingly fast, and which is simply awesome (I know, my opinion).

Anyway, no tips for nice websites which use Flask?

[untitaker]

You can't really show off how nice the webserver part of a site is. That's mostly the task of frontend dev.

[kramer65]

I know you are right. It's just that those are not really arguments I can convince someone with.

My question is dead simple; do you know any large websites using Flask? If not, that's fine. If you do, any name would be great!

[ThiefMaster]

Indico, which powers http://indico.cern.ch is using flask in the development branch. But it's not in production yet - but once it is, it'll probably be one of the biggest webapps using Flask (both in code size and data size)

[andyparsons]

Flask has been running in production for over a year at my company, Happify (www.happify.com). We’re a NYC-based consumer site with a sizable user base and quite a bit of recent press.

[kramer65]

@ThiefMaster @andyparsons Thanks, that already helps. happify.com is a nice website by the way. I just registered.. :) May I ask what kind of traffic you are having?

(any other websites still welcome btw..)

[clintecker]

Flask powered the entire campaign API for president Obama's reelection campaign, also known as Narwhal. The project wasn't Facebook scale or anything but it was almost certainly bigger and more heavily used than most projects ever see.

[sergedomk]

You shouldn't use the Werkzeug WSGI engine to power a production site. Not that this is a problem given that you can run a Flask application on gevent, gunicorn, twisted, tornado, etc. If you need big names, I'd start looking there.

Flask provides a framework and a great engine for use when developing and debugging. You should push the advantages the framework presents for the project you're building over other frameworks. Flask is lightweight, easily extendable, has a large community supporting it, etc.

With frameworks, it's the best for the project. Not the best for all.

"Don't use a cannon to kill a mosquito." - Confucius

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 6:14 AM, Clint Ecker notifications@github.comwrote:

Flask powered the entire campaign API for president Obama's reelection campaign, also known as Narwhal. The project wasn't Facebook scale or anything but it was almost certainly bigger and more heavily used than most projects ever see.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/issues/914#issuecomment-28486517 .

[Auha]

If your company is using a lot of technology then don't pick anything confusing or hard to learn. Flask is easy to learn and easy to adopt.

[kramer65]

@sergedomk I know that the actual WSGI engine of Flask is not for production. I just want to use the Flask framework, which I love for it's speed of work.

@Auha I totally agree, that's why I love Flask, and want to learn more about it. But seeing that our company is rather php-minded, I think it's going to be a hard task.

Alright, down for the hard work; I'm going to call my manager right now. I'll let you guys know what the result was..

[andyparsons]

@kramer65 I can't disclose daily traffic, but we have well over 100K active users not including our mobile app which just launched. We have done a lot of benchmarking our Flask-based API with uWSGI and are very happy with capacity and stability.

[kramer65]

Well, I just had a chat, and I'll be using Flask for the prototype. The end product (we always completely rebuild after the prototype) needs to be built in PHP. I'm happy with this for now. We'll see what happens later.. :)

[ThiefMaster]

eww, php :p

[kramer65]

I know. Php is legacy stuff.. :)

[ghost]

We have a mailing list for this sort of things. Please don't fill up the bug tracker with unrelated things ;-)

[DasIch]

What @gioi said

[tony]

When my work asked for production sites using flask, I showed them this: http://flask.pocoo.org/community/poweredby/

Sadly, I can't use flask at work. There has to be large companies out there who use werkzeug/jinja/flask (even if it's not on their main site).

I feel disappointed seeing this issue was shut down. I feel more people would participate if it was here, but really wish we could aggregate a list of who's using flask, werkzeug, jinja.

[philliproso]

Well rachel sanders says linkedIn uses it. "...linkedIN's internal staff is python, python and flask..", crowd goes wooooot I think that should be enough. Her pycon 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXN3wuHUBP0

[tony]

@philliproso: Thank you for that.

There is organic praise of Flask, blueprints, its' codebase readily available in reddit / hackernews comments. Developers working at large places may not have time to sign up for a mailing list. In the here and now, of mentioning if and how they use flask at their company, they hold the value of disclosing that, so anything that makes that process more fluid is better.

If anyone comes about this and uses and uses Flask or Werkzeug on a large application or for any internal use at a company, or anything else you feel is noteworthy, please feel free to chime in here.

[andyparsons]

At Happify, we're one of the larger consumer apps based on Flask and I've spoken about our experience at the NYC Flask meetup and elsewhere including a poster talk at Pycon. The experience has been excellent.

[davidism]

Sorry to rain on this parade, but as the close reason said:

We have a mailing list for this sort of things. Please don't fill up the bug tracker with unrelated things ;-)

I would suggest subscribing to the list and making a thread there.

[untitaker]

~afaik the list doesn't even work.~

[ThiefMaster]

to be honest, mailing lists are a pain in the ass. a (good!) forum would not be bad though...

[untitaker]

I guess that's personal preference, i myself prefer mailing lists...

[gawry]

I know that this is old but Pinterest API was made with flask.

http://www.quora.com/What-challenges-has-Pinterest-encountered-with-Flask/answer/Steve-Cohen?srid=hXZd&share=1

[atlithorn]

Flask-RESTful (http://flask-restful.readthedocs.org) by the good folks at Twilio (https://www.twilio.com/open-source) is a big reason we (https://getsling.com) felt safe choosing Flask

[philippe2803]

A bit late to the party, but my sites are all running on Flask. It's a search engine which works with Elasticsearch. My app handles over 1 million requests per day, and it works like a charm. If you want to see it in action.

There is very good documentation for deployment on AWS Elastic Beanstalk too. I highly recommend.

[dellelce]

After 4 years this question is still valid, anyone has any good example not already mentioned?

[davidism]

Please use the mailing list for this type of discussion. https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/flask