Flask app getting error of “could not locate flask application. …FLASK_APP environment variable” for Flask Migrate

Question

I have a file db_table.py that looks like:

from flask import Flask
from flask_sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
from flask_migrate import Migrate

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Answer 1

The flask command line argument needs to know what module to locate the current Flask app instance in.

Set FLASK_APP as an environment variable:

export FLASK_APP=db_table.py

before running your flask command-line app.

See the Command Line Interface documentation:

For the flask script to work, an application needs to be discovered. This is achieved by exporting the FLASK_APP environment variable. It can be either set to an import path or to a filename of a Python module that contains a Flask application.

You can also set the variable per command by setting it on the same command line:

FLASK_APP=db_table.py flask db init