A simple way to demo Flask apps from your machine. Makes your Flask apps running on localhost available over the internet via the excellent ngrok tool.

Python 3.6+ is required.

pip install flask-ngrok

Notebooks have an issue with newer versions of Flask, so force an older version if working in these environments.

!pip install flask==0.12.2

See the example notebook for a working example.

1. Import with from flask_ngrok import run_with_ngrok
2. Add run_with_ngrok(app) to make your Flask app available upon running

# flask_ngrok_example.py
from flask import Flask
from flask_ngrok import run_with_ngrok

app = Flask(__name__)
run_with_ngrok(app)  # Start ngrok when app is run

@app.route("/")
def hello():
    return "Hello World!"

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()

Running the example:

python flask_ngrok_example.py
 * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
 * Running on http://<random-address>.ngrok.io
 * Traffic stats available on http://127.0.0.1:4040