Flask and Lab Setup

In this chapter, we will continue to use a virtual environment to isolate the Python environment and dependencies. We can start a new virtual environment, or we can continue to use the existing virtual environment that we have been using. My preference is to start a new virtual environment. For me, I will call it ch09-venv:

$ python3 -m venv ch09-venv
$ source ch09-venv/bin/activate

In this chapter, we will install quite a few Python packages. To make life easier, I have included a requirements.txt file on this book's GitHub repository; we can use it to install all the necessary packages (remember to activate your virtual environment). You should see packages being downloaded and successfully installed during the installation process:

(ch09-venv) $ cat requirements.txt 
click==8.1.3
Flask==2.2.2
itsdangerous==2.1.2
Jinja2==3.1.2
MarkupSafe==2.1.1
Werkzeug==2.2.2 
…
(ch09-venv) $ pip install -r requirements.txt

For our network topology, we will use the...