Plugins

It’s fairly easy to ship a plugin for Flask-Debug with your own package or Flask-extension. This allows you to ship debugging tools right along with the extension.

First, create a package named flask_debug_yourname, the prefix flask_debug_ is important. Your __init__.py should look somewhat like this:

# file: flask_debug_myext/__init__.py

template_folder = 'templates'

def initialize_debug_ext(dbg):
    @dbg.route('/_myext/status')
    def debug_list_extensions():
        status = 'all good'

        return render_template('myext/status.html', status=status)

initialize_debug_ext() will be called with a flask.Blueprint-Object as the first parameter, onto which you can register your own routes. The route() function will automatically a menu entry (to suppress this behavior, add an argument of menu_name=None).

There are a few conventions:

• Views in plugins should start with debug_.
• URLs in routes should start with underscore + your extension name.
• Inside your templates-folder, you should also create subfolder named myext for all of your templates, as the template namespace is global.

Flask-Debug ships a few base templates which you can use, which will use Flask-Bootstrap if available, or a minimal included template otherwise:

{# file: flask_debug_myext/templates/myext/status.html #}
{% extends "flask_debug/base.html" %}

{% block content %}
{{super()}}
<h1>Status for myext</h1>
<p>Current status: {{status}}</p>
{% endblock %}

To finally load the plugin, just do:

import flask_debug_myext

in your extension. Before registering the debugging-blueprint onto the app, Flask-Debug will query sys.modules for all modules that look like Flask-Debug plugins and collect them.

You can check out the flask_debug_plugins-plugin (which lists all installed plugins) for an example.