Quick Start GuideΒΆ

Albatross includes a tool that quickly creates the bare-bones of an Albatross application:

albtross create myapp

This will create a directory called myapp in the current directory. If you change into this directory, you can easily start this application using the stand-alone development web server:

cd myapp
albatross serve

If you point your web browser at http://localhost:8000/, you should see the skeleton application in action. To stop the development server, press Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Break.

The application directory contains the elements of a basic application:

  • app.py is the main script that creates the application object,
  • app.ini contains configuration settings such as the name of the initial page, and the name of the application
  • app.log contains details of any exceptions that occur while the application is running. Your application can also call ctx.log() to save debugging information to the log.
  • pages contains the application pages (.py extension) and associated HTML templates (.html extension).
  • static contains the elements of the application which are not dynamically generated, such as the style sheet and any graphical assets.
  • session contains the user session data when the session-file based context model is used.

The skeleton application implements several pages for demonstration purposes. You can (and should) replace or remove these to suit your purposes. Each page has a .py file containing code, and usually an .html file containing the associated HTML template. The demonstration pages are:

  • environment - this displays the current system environment variables. You should not leave this page in place on a production server, as this information might help attackers.
  • main - this is the initial application page. If you want another page to display when users first access your application, you should edit the app.ini file and change the start_page variable
  • new_session - this page just deletes the user’s current session. If you implement a user login scheme, you could implement something similar to log the user out.
  • raise_exception - this page contains a deliberate error to demonstrate exception handling.

As well as these application pages, the pages directory contains several other template files:

  • macros.html contains page header and footer macros used by all the page modules to give a consistent look to the application.
  • page_not_found.html is shown if a user requests a page that doesn’t exist in the current application.
  • session_expired.html is shown if a user’s session has expired due to inactivity.
  • uncaught_exception.html is shown by the Albatross framework when an unexpected exception occurs in the framework or in your application. The demonstration template shows HTML and Python tracebacks.

If you decide at this point that you’d like a new page called cool, run:

albatross add-page cool

You will now have a cool.py and cool.html in the pages directory.

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