Flask Track Usage Primer

Flask Track Usage is a very light weight Flask extension to track usage traffic for Flask apps. This post will give you a brief introduction to the usage and merits.

Recently I had a requirement to add light weight tracking for a Flask app. Tools like Google analytics was not an option because, I wanted raw number and data handy rather than just figures, this was a website page in the intranet, and I also wanted to easily track all the REST apis. That is when I stumbled upon Steve Milner's Flask-Track-Usage package.

The API and usage is incredibly simple, and as of version 0.0.7 supported Mongo DB storage. Since Mongo was not an option for me, I added SQLAlchemy based storage, thus opening doors for a wide array of databases. These additions will be released as part of version 1.0.0.

Here is a quick-start version on using SQLStorage with Flask-Track-Usage:

# mainapp.py
# Create the Flask 'app'
from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

# Set the configuration items manually for the example
app.config['TRACK_USAGE_USE_FREEGEOIP'] = False
app.config['TRACK_USAGE_INCLUDE_OR_EXCLUDE_VIEWS'] = 'include'

# We will just print out the data for the example
from flask.ext.track_usage import TrackUsage
from flask.ext.track_usage.storage.sql import SQLStorage

# Make an instance of the extension
t = TrackUsage(app, SQLStorage(conn_str="sqlite:///D:\\usage_tracking.db"))

# Make an instance of the extension
t = TrackUsage(app, storage)

# Include the view in the metrics
@t.include
@app.route('/')
def index():
    return "Hello"

# Run the application!
app.run(debug=True)

In the code above, the SQLStorage object is created with a conn_str argument which can be any of the engine configurations supported by SQLAlchemy itself.

You can use Flask-Track-Usage with blueprints as well. This is how you include blueprints views:

# Here app is the Flask app created in mainapp.py
app.config['TRACK_USAGE_INCLUDE_OR_EXCLUDE_VIEWS'] = 'include'

# Make an instance of the extension
t = TrackUsage(app, SQLStorage(conn_str="sqlite:///D:\\usage_tracking.db"))

# exclude just the a_blueprint out
from my_blueprints import a_blueprint
t.exclude_blueprint(a_blueprint)

What we have done here is to include all views, except for the ones in the blueprint a_blueprint. You can instead exclude all by default, and include just the specific ones as shown below.

# Here app is the Flask app created in mainapp.py
app.config['TRACK_USAGE_INCLUDE_OR_EXCLUDE_VIEWS'] = 'exclude'

# Make an instance of the extension
t = TrackUsage(app, SQLStorage(conn_str="sqlite:///D:\\usage_tracking.db"))

from my_blueprints import a_blueprint
t.include_blueprint(a_blueprint)

Once you have setup the extension to track usage, you can even use the _get_usage method part of the Storage object to view the usage hits. This method returns a list of JSON dict and has the following schema:

[
    {
            'url': str,
            'user_agent': {
                'browser': str,
                'language': str,
                'platform': str,
                'version': str,
            },
            'blueprint': str,
            'view_args': dict or None
            'status': int,
            'remote_addr': str,
            'authorization': bool,
            'ip_info': str or None,
            'path': str,
            'speed': float,
            'date': datetime,
    },
    {
        ....
    }
]

   Programming   Python  

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