Configuration¶
Redis¶
In order to use Flask-SSE, you need a Redis server to handle pubsub. Flask-SSE will search the application config for a Redis connection URL to use. It will try the following configuration values, in order:
SSE_REDIS_URLREDIS_URL
If it doesn’t find a Redis connection URL, Flask-SSE will raise a
KeyError any time a client tries to access the SSE stream, or any time
an event is published.
We recommend that you set this connection URL in an environment variable,
and then load it into your application configuration using os.environ,
like this:
import os
from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)
app.config["REDIS_URL"] = os.environ.get("REDIS_URL")
If you are using a Redis server that has a password use:
app.config["REDIS_URL"] = "redis://:password@localhost"
Application Server¶
Flask-SSE does not work with Flask’s built-in development server, due to the nature of the server-sent events protocol. This protocol uses long-lived HTTP requests to push data from the server to the client, which means that an HTTP request to the event stream will effectively never complete. Flask’s built-in development server is single threaded, so it can only handle one HTTP request at a time. Once a client connects to the event stream, it will not be able to make any other HTTP requests to your site.
Instead, you must use a web server with asychronous workers. Asynchronous workers allow one worker to continuously handle the long-lived HTTP request that server-sent events require, while other workers simultaneously handle other HTTP requests to the server. Gunicorn is an excellent choice for an application server, since it can work with gevent to use asychronous workers: see gunicorn’s design documentation.
For further information, see Flask’s deployment documentation. Note that Flask’s development server should never be used for deployment, regardless of whether you use Flask-SSE.
