Python: Flask – Generating a Static HTML Page

Whenever I need to quickly spin up a web application, Python’s Flask library is my go to tool. Recently, however, I found myself wanting to generate a static HTML page to upload to S3 and wondered if I could use it for that as well.

It’s actually not too tricky. If we’re in the scope of the app context then we have access to the template rendering that we’d normally use when serving the response to a web request.

The following code will generate an HTML file based on a template file templates/blog.html:

from flask import render_template
import flask

app = flask.Flask('my app')

if __name__ == "__main__":
    with app.app_context():
        rendered = render_template('blog.html', \
            title = "My Generated Page", \
            people = [{"name": "Mark"}, {"name": "Michael"}])
        print(rendered)

templates/index.html

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
<title>{{ title }}</title>
  </head>
  <body>
<h1>{{ title }}</h1>
  <ul>
  {% for person in people %}
    <li>{{ person.name }}</li>
  {% endfor %}
  </ul>
  </body>
</html>

If we execute the Python script it will generate the following HTML:

$ python blog.py 
<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
<title>My Generated Page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
<h1>My Generated Page</h1>
  <ul>

    <li>Mark</li>

    <li>Michael</li>

  </ul>

  </body>
</html>

And we can finish off by redirecting that output into a file:

$ python blog.py  > blog.html

We could also write to the file from Python, but this seems just as easy!