Running

Is your view app running, you better go catch it!

Serving

You can simply run a view app via the view serve command, but if you're like me and would rather to just use the python3 command, that's just as easy.

With view serve, you must be in the working directory of your app (i.e. there's an app.py, view.toml, or something of the sort), but with python3 (or your default Python command), all you need to do is execute the file with the app.run() in it.

The Run Call

app.run() is a special method, since it acts differently depending on the context. When running your app via view serve, this method does nothing, due to the presence of a special environment variable.

When running programmatically (i.e. via python3), it's what calls app.load() in simple and filesystem loading.

For my more experienced Python dev's, it also handles the pesky if __name__ == '__main__ via some Python black magic, so no need to worry about your app starting when importing from that file. Here's an example:

from view import new_app

app = new_app()

if __name__ == '__main__':  # This is redundant!
    app.run()

Specifying the location

If you used view init, a file called app.py should have been created for you with an app variable declared as a new app instance. By default, changing either of these will break the view serve command, since it's configured to look for an app variable in an app.py file.

If you go to your configuration, you may change this via the app_path setting:

[app]
app_path = "my_different_file.py:my_cool_app_name"

In the format above, you can see we specify the file name first, and then the variable name second, both separated by a colon in the middle.

Fancy mode and hijacks

By default, view.py will hijack the server's logger and open a fancy interface that's much cooler to look at (especially if you're being watched by others).

You can disable this behaviour via the hijack and fancy settings:

[log]
hijack = false
fancy = false