Flask generated page - time

Showing a static text in the previous example was already a success, but we would like to be able to have a more dynamic web site. In this example we’ll go a tiny step further and we’ll see how to display the current time.

We have the same skeleton as in the previous example, but this time the main function serving the root path returns some HTML that will be displayed as a link to the /time path.

We also have a second route mapping the /time path to the show_time function.

We run the application the same way as before on the command line.

Now if we access the http://127.0.0.1:5000/ URL we’ll see the text time that we can click on. When we click on it we arrive at the http://127.0.0.1:5000/time page that shows the current time.

Actually, it will show the number of seconds from the epoch, which is January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 (UTC).

Something like this: 1594528012.7892551

At this point you can refresh the page using Ctrl-r and you’ll see that the number changes.

The code

from flask import Flask
import time

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def main_page():
    return '<a href="/time">show time</a>'

@app.route("/time")
def show_time():
    return str(time.time())

To run it

flask --app show_time run