Change Flask Root Folder for Templates and Static Files

Today I was facing a problem, I didn’t know how to change Flask root directory. Flask by default look for templates and static files under the root directory (/), how can we change that?

Changing the root path

Here’s my directory structure:

.
├── api_files
│   ├── static
│   │   └── style.css
│   └── templates
│       └── index.html
├── api.py
├── Pipfile
└── Pipfile.lock

3 directories, 5 files

I want Flask to be able to process the folders static and templates inside the api_files folder, my main Flask app is api.py which is outside the api_files folder. Let’s open it up and change that behavior so it can process the templates and static files inside that folder.

from flask import Flask, render_template

# here we can set a different root path
app = Flask(__name__, root_path='api_files/')


@app.route('/')
def index():
    """Render home page."""
    return render_template('index.html')  # we can render templates as usual


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()

This way, Flask will no longer look for templates and static files under the project root (/) path, but inside the folder api_files instead.

There’s a lot of solutions out there about changing jinja2 configuration, I think this is a way more easier and cleaner approach.

You can read more about variables and the Flask API here.