flask-statistics

Flask-Statistics

Flask-Statistics is an extensions that collects data from requests send to the server to then display statistics like response-time, hits, unique hits, etc.

Installation

You can install the extensions with pip:

$ pip install flask-statistics

Usage

Below is a small example on how to use the extension.

from flask import Flask
from flask_sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
from flask_statistics import Statistics

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config["SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI"] = "sqlite:///database.db"

db = SQLAlchemy(app)

class Request(db.Model):
    __tablename__ = "request"

    index = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True, autoincrement=True)
    response_time = db.Column(db.Float)
    date = db.Column(db.DateTime)
    method = db.Column(db.String)
    size = db.Column(db.Integer)
    status_code = db.Column(db.Integer)
    path = db.Column(db.String)
    user_agent = db.Column(db.String)
    remote_address = db.Column(db.String)
    exception = db.Column(db.String)
    referrer = db.Column(db.String)
    browser = db.Column(db.String)
    platform = db.Column(db.String)
    mimetype = db.Column(db.String)

statistics = Statistics(app, db, Request)

@app.route("/")
def index():
    return "Hello World!"

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

The script above sets up a basic SQLAlchemy Database. When initalizing the statistics extensions, you will have to provide a model (here: Request) to store the data in.

Now, whenever a user requests an endpoint, it will be stored in the defined model.

If you are in debug mode and an exception occures, teardown of the request will not happen and therefore it won't be stored in the database. If you want to teardown it by force, set PRESERVE_CONTEXT_ON_EXCEPTION to False in the config.

Things that are stored

Key	Type	Description
response_time	float	The time it took the server to process the request.
date	datetime.datetime	The date the request was send to the server (in UTC).
method	str	The HTTP method that was used (e.g. GET, POST, ..).
size	int	The body size in bytes that was send to the client.
status_code	int	The status code that was returned by the request.
user_agent	str	The User-Agent that was send with the request.
remote_address	str	The ip address of the client.
exception	str	If an error occured, this field will have the error message and the status_code will automatically be 500. Example: ZeroDivisionError('division by zero')
referrer	str	Link to the website that referred the user to the endpoint.
browser	str	The browser that was used to send the request. Example: firefox 72.0
platform	str	Operating System the request was send from.
mimetype	str	Mimetype of the response send to the client (e.g. html/text).

View the statistics

Flask-Statistics will add a blueprint with the prefix ../statistics to your app.

Config

Name	Type	Description	Default
STATISTICS_DEFAULT_DATE_SPAN	datetime.timedelta	If no date was selected, it will be set to today as end and today - option as start.	datetime.timedelta(days=7)

Protect the route

Flask-Statistics accepts a fourth argument: A function that is called before any requests to the statistics blueprint.

...

def check_if_user_is_allowed():
    # check if user is allowed to
    # e.g. JWT Token, Flask Login etc.
    # ...
    if not allowed:
        return redirect(url_for("index"))

statistics = Statistics(app, db, Request, check_if_user_is_allowed)

There you can check if the user has the required permissions to view the statistics. If not, redirect him to another page.

Disable statistics

If a user has opt-out, request record can be disabled with custom function disable_f.

statistics = Statistics(app, db, Request, disable_f= lambda: current_user.has_optout() )

or

def has_disable_cookie():
    return request.cookies.get('disable_stat') == 'True'

statistics = Statistics(app, db, Request, disable_f=has_disable_cookie )