Flask Blog

A full-featured blogging application built with Flask, following modern best practices including modular blueprints, custom error handling, and secure user authentication.

🚀 Features

User Management

• Secure Authentication: User registration and login using hashed passwords (Bcrypt).
• Session Management: Persistent login sessions with Flask-Login.
• Account Dashboard: Users can update their username, email, and upload a profile picture.
• Profile Customization: Automatic image resizing for profile pictures (Pillow).
• Password Reset: Secure token-based password reset functionality via email.

Blog Functionality

• Full CRUD: Create, Read, Update, and Delete blog posts.
• Post Ownership: Users can only edit or delete their own posts.
• Pagination: Browse posts efficiently with built-in pagination on home and user-specific post pages.
• User Activity: View all posts from a specific user.

Technical Excellence

• Blueprints: Modular structure for Users, Posts, Main, and Error handling.

• Custom Error Handling: Professional error pages for 404 (Not Found), 403 (Forbidden), and 500 (Internal Server Error).

• Configuration Management: Environment variable based configuration using python-dotenv.

• Database Architecture: Managed via Flask-SQLAlchemy with relationships.

• Neon PostgreSQL as the production database (configured via DATABASE_URL).

• Flask‑Migrate for database schema migrations.

• Supabase Storage for user profile pictures:

  • Images are resized to 125×125px.
  • Uploaded directly to a Supabase bucket (profile_pics).
  • The public URL is stored in User.image_url and used throughout the UI.
  • A default avatar is served from Supabase when a user has no custom picture.

• Removed local filesystem storage for profile pictures – all images are now hosted on Supabase, eliminating Vercel read‑only filesystem issues.

• Responsive UI that displays avatars on:

  • Account page (/account).
  • Home feed (/home).
  • Individual post view.
  • User posts page.

• Environment configuration via .env (or Vercel dashboard) for:

  • SUPABASE_URL
  • SUPABASE_BUCKET
  • SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY
  • DATABASE_URL
  • SECRET_KEY

• Error handling for image upload failures with graceful fallback.

Setup (local development)

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/a-pt/flask-blog.git
cd flask-blog

# Create a virtual environment
python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate   # on Windows

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Create a .env file (copy from .env.example) and fill in your credentials
cp .env.example .env

# Initialise the database (Neon or local PostgreSQL)
flask db upgrade

# Run the development server
python run.py

Deployment (Vercel)

1. Connect the repository to Vercel.
2. Add the same environment variables (DATABASE_URL, SUPABASE_URL, SUPABASE_BUCKET, SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY, SECRET_KEY).
3. Vercel will automatically run python run.py (or you can configure a custom start script).
4. All profile pictures are stored in Supabase, so the read‑only filesystem on Vercel is no longer a limitation.

License

MIT License – see LICENSE for details.